Back to school!

My third week here in Brisbane brought about the first day of school for me... oh ya, SCHOOL! That little thing. I had almost forgotten that the whole point I was here was for obtaining my master’s degree. I am taking some pretty daunting courses-- Intro to Biostatistics and Intro to Epidemiology, as well as two other courses that are a bit less scary. I have both of the daunting ones back to back on Mondays! A straight 6 hours of it. However, Monday proved itself to be much more enjoyable and survivable than I had anticipated, and in all honesty, the structure and material of the classes themselves didn't seem too much different from school in the U.S. (note: my Biostatistics professor is a young girl from the U.S., so I mean LITERALLY, there is hardly any difference there!)

However, looking around the room in my first lecture of 150 students, and attending my 20-person "tutorial" section today, showed me how very different school is here from the U.S. 

(For those Australian Rotarians and friends reading this: when I say "school," I mean "uni" right now... and for my American readers, "uni" is just Australian for "university,” and I will probably start using that word without really realizing it. You really have to distinguish which type of level of education you're referring to here. When I tell Australians that "I went to school in Los Angeles," they assume I went to a boarding school in Los Angeles as an elementary school kid, not for my undergraduate university degree. There are lots of specifics like this to get caught up on here!! I seem to be having to explain myself quite often, but I am gradually catching on and fitting in!)

Ok back to the diversity at uni here. First off, when I was at UCLA and we referred to having a diverse international student population, that was just a downright lie. We had a lot of people representing different ethnicities, but they were either still American, or they were international students from China. Or if they were really international students from another country, there were so few of them that they didn’t stand out and influence class discussions all that much. If you come to Australia, you really see what an international student population looks like! I would estimate that one-fourth of my first lecture were Caucasian students from Canada, the U.S., or Australia, one-fourth were Chinese, one-fifth were African, one-sixth were Southeast Asian, and that remaining fraction (too much math/biostatistics for me today…) were Middle Eastern. And when I say that these students were African or Southeast Asian, I don't mean that they came over to Australia as children and have been living here for a while, but that they have just moved here in the last year or few weeks to specifically be here as an international student, and they will be returning home to pursue careers once they complete their respective degrees. (I don’t mean to discredit the students who have been living in Australia/U.S. for a while but still retain and identify with much of their native culture, but I do very much value in a different way the people who still live in their native country and possess a unique worldview and life experiences that were developed completely in that original country.)

Of course this type of invaluable diversity really doesn't matter too much in a lecture-type learning environment, so day 1 of classes passed without much difference to my American uni experience. However, it was today in my "tutorial" section of 20 students where it was just... COOL!! And I mean that in the dorkiest of "I'm obsessed with studying international relations/development/public health" kind of ways.

One of my first "class friends" that I made today in my Biostatistics tutorial section is Wumi, a girl in her mid to late 20s who is a midwife from Nigeria. We were put together in a discussion group to analyze why selecting people at random from a community's "voter registry" to survey people on their health would produce biased sampling. I rattled off the very obvious--"because you don't include kids under the voting age" and "you don't include people who aren't registered to vote." Duh. After I rattled off my underwhelming contribution to the group, Wumi added the point, "Yes, the people who aren't registered to vote is good, but what you're saying refers to something so big. There are so many reasons why people might not be registered to vote. So many people can’t vote sometimes. There are the people who you might say just don't care or are too lazy, but then there are people who can't because of religious reasons. In my country, religious reasons play a very big factor in this and they can't go vote even if they want to. You would really be missing out on the people from those religions."

At least one of “those religions” that Wumi was referring to is Islam, as over 50% of Nigeria’s population is Muslim. Certain sects of Islam obey Shari’a Law. Devout Muslims have different beliefs in terms of their medical practices and their social structure can sometimes contain significant gender differences that could affect their healthcare received or political participation. Although I admittedly know very little about the governmental structure of Nigeria, I can see now why my very vague grouping of people who just “aren’t on the voter registry” does not describe the biases that would be present if you tried to conduct a survey like this in Nigeria. In the U.S. where “separation of church and state” is revered, I wouldn’t have thought of what a CULTURAL bias using a governmental/political registry would produce and how skewed my health survey would end up if I were in most other countries.

Ok, stand up and take a breather! I know this blog entry is getting rather wordy, and I apologize, but I really can’t help it. I ramble a lot and editing this might make this more of a chore than a fun way to keep in contact with everyone. I have just one other anecdote about my epiphanies from being in such a diverse student body:

As we were introducing ourselves today in my tutorial section, we had to do the typical thing where you say your name, where you’re from, what you’re studying, and what your favorite food is. The first girls to go were 3 Canadians who were all friends. Each of them responded to the “favorite food” part with chocolate, Kettle Corn popcorn, and the third said she was “…addicted to those spicy flaming-hot red Cheetos.” These are all very normal answers to this type of name game. I am usually a bit of an oddball with this—apparently when I was a kid my answer would be “artichokes,” “apricots and nectarines,” or “sushi,” but that’s just me being the weirdo. However, I was still very surprised when the first non-North American student responded saying her favorite food was simply “rice” and she kind of giggled like she was very shy to admit that, but it was clear it was the truth. I can’t remember where she was from but she was wearing a beautiful magenta scarf around her head and under her neck. The next guy to go said his favorite food was “beans and chicken.” A student from (I think) Tanzania at one point said “fish soup.” An emergency room doctor from Saudi Arabia said, “whatever my mom cooks, but especially meat with rice.”

You get my gist. Without any exaggeration on my part, all of the Australian, North American, and Chinese students admitted some sort of junk food as their favorite food, whereas the students that were from an African country or a Middle Eastern country named something that we would consider a very bland staple to our diet as their most favorite food in the world! (I seem to be forgetting what Trung from Vietnam said, she was also in mine and Wumi’s discussion group, so I am leaving out the couple of Southeast Asian students… but again, you get my gist.)

(Note: this was not true simple random sampling on my part, so therefore this is not an unbiased survey. These were all international students in an international public health class, so it’s definitely a biased sample! Don’t assume that all people in Africa and the Middle East don’t eat and crave junk food as much as North Americans, Chinese, and Australians do! Haha. See, I am learning something from Biostats!)

As an International Public Health student, and after having just blogged about obesity and food portions in Australia vs. the U.S., this further informal lesson on diet and nutrition throughout the world was just fascinating to me. Who knows if I’m taking a little thing and making a big deal out of nothing, and who knows what socioeconomics and culture and society have to do with this over the agency of an individual, and what any of this really says about health and the future of obesity rates in various countries, but maybe by the end of this year I can come back and produce a more profound conclusion to these little “wow!” moments of mine. For now, I hope they at least entertain you and make you think a bit more about global health differences.