Alison Eubanks is an aspiring healthcare provider. During her experience as a Community Fellow with the Health, Research, and Evaluations Department at the University of Illinois College of Medicine-Rockford Campus (UICOMR), she has made connections between her courses on campus and her internship, learning more about the barriers to healthcare and how outreach programming can help alleviate the burden of healthcare stress.

Eubanks assisted members of the department with projects aimed at assessing and improving public health outreach efforts in the surrounding area. While performing duties in data entry and analysis, survey design and formatting, and literature reviews, she contributed to a study on patient experience with Continuous Glucose Monitors for diabetes management, a survey determining the health needs and barriers to healthcare access for low-income populations in the Rockford area, and a literature review assessing the effectiveness of various diabetes prevention programs in gestational diabetes management.

Eubanks built her skills using survey software, entering and transforming data, using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping and statistical analysis in Excel, while the commute to Rockford helped develop her time management skills. And, she celebrates how her understanding of the field went far beyond these technical skills.

“I have learned more about what a career in public health research looks like and the various professions that exist within the field,” she said. “This experience has opened my eyes to the plethora of public health outreach programs operating in the Beloit-Rockford area and their significant impacts on the communities they are targeting.”