Dear Friedman Community,
I am living in one of the greatest cities, enrolled in an amazing graduate program and I have the honor of thanking the donors, who have helped make my life in Boston a reality. My name is Jessica Jones-Hughes and I am a second year student in the combined Master's and Dietetic Internship Program at the Frances Stern Nutrition Center and Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Because of generous contributions to the Annual Fund last year by alumni and other friends, I have been granted the opportunity to attend the Friedman School, one of the top nutrition schools in the world!
Since arriving in Boston and starting classes, I am constantly amazed at the opportunities and activities available to students. To fulfill the dietetic internship portion of my degree, my program is set up different than the normal MS track. While taking classes, I also did rotations at various community, clinical and food service sites around Boston. Rotations allow interns to shadow a Registered Dietitian in order to gain exposure to their job, as well as to gain experience in the field of nutrition. The American Dietetic Association has set up strict criteria that must be met in the rotations to become a R.D. The Frances Stern Nutrition Center goes above and beyond the ADA criteria by meeting all requirements and granting students almost double the hours of experience in the clinical setting.
As part of the MS program, students are required to do a research-focused project on any nutrition-related subject. I am interested in the international nutrition field and decided to focus my research project on community nutrition. The incredible faculty at Tufts connected me to HelpMercy International, a small NGO founded by a Tufts Medical student that provides support to a resource-poor hospital in rural Zambia. In November 2007, HelpMercy helped to fund a nutrition intervention that provided seeds and agriculture education to HIV/AIDS affected households.
My research focused on evaluating the program and its benefit to the beneficiaries. After much work on the ground in Boston, including writing a household survey and gaining Institutional Review Board research approval from Tufts and the University of Zambia I headed off to Zambia this past summer for 2 months! It was an incredible experience: surveying 70 extremely rural households (our research team typically made roads with our car!), observing the nutrition needs of a rural hospital and gaining insight into an incredible culture. I felt very prepared for the work in Zambia thanks to the numerous classes I took prior to departure, particularly, Survey Research, International Nutrition Programs, and Monitoring and Evaluation, which were incredibly interactive and prepared me with practical skills for my time in Zambia.
With the recent economic shift and as student loans become more difficult to secure, Annual Fund gifts, which support student scholarships, become even more important.
Sincerely,
Jessica Jones-Hughes
MS Candidate, Frances Stern Combined Dietetic Internship/Master's Degree Program
Tufts University, The Gerald J. & Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
P.S. If you are interested in learning more about the research in Zambia, I kept a blog during my time there. For more about HelpMercy, you can visit their website.
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