Exchanging Students and Ideas with Mexican Public Health Institute.

In her classes this spring, Ahtziri Yoatzin Sánchez was struck by her classmates’ diversity of experiences. “There was a lot of participation by people from different parts of the world,” she says in Spanish, explaining how their perspectives—and knowledge of public health interventions in their own countries—enriched her classes.

Her classmates could perhaps say the same for her: Sánchez is a student at the public health school based at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and the first INSP student to participate in a new exchange program with the School of Public Health.

“The aim of the exchange program is to provide MPH students from both institutions with the opportunity to learn side by side,” says Veronika Wirtz, associate professor of global health and visiting professor at INSP, who coordinates the program.

This is the second summer SPH students are working alongside INSP students on community health assessments in Mexico. In return, INSP students—beginning with Sánchez—can spend a semester taking classes at SPH.

The program aims to make the most of the different perspectives and experiences of students from the two schools, and to expose them to how public health professionals in another country tackle health issues.

Reflecting on her courses at SPH, Sánchez says what she learned will be invaluable back at her school. “I believe I will be able to apply all of that knowledge when I return to Mexico, to better realize interventions in important areas like obesity,” she says, “and chronic diseases like diabetes or cardiovascular disease that we have really high rates of in Mexico.”

Wirtz says Sánchez, a general practitioner with a master’s in nutrition, was also an excellent addition to her course, Confronting Non-Communicable Diseases in Low and Middle Income Countries. “She was so engaged and enriched our class discussion tremendously with her experiences,” says Wirtz.

“BU students benefit from the experiences that INSP students bring to class.”

—Michelle Samuels