Hannah Rabinowitz, Healthcare in British Context Summer 2024
Hello! My name is Hannah Rabinowitz and I studied abroad on the Healthcare in British Context Program this summer. Through this program, I took a Comparative Health Systems course and completed a healthcare internship. As part of the internship, I was enrolled in a Global Internship Course with other students completing internships, allowing us to discuss our experience and professional development. During my six weeks taking courses in London, I found that the academic environment was very different from my courses at Pitt. At Pitt, I am a Rehabilitation Science major, so I spent my first two years completing prerequisites for the School of Health and Rehabilitation Science. My classes are often very large with over 200 students. Many of the classes I have taken at Pitt are lecture based and mainly involve listening and note-taking. I found that my classes through CEA CAPA in London were very different. My Comparative Health Systems Course had less than 20 students enrolled in it. During the six weeks, we completed two presentations and presented them to the class. These presentations were very engaging, because we each researched a topic and then were able to teach each other about a variety of subjects through these presentations. Additionally, we performed a debate in class regarding reproductive rights, and we went on a field trip to learn about the social determinants of health. The small class size with many collaborative activities was very different from my class experiences at Pitt. The way my work was evaluated also differed from my Pitt courses, because there were many papers and presentations, rather than exams. My other class was a Global Internship Course, where we discussed our internships abroad and how we were growing as a professional. During this class, we completed mock interviews, learned presentational skills from a guest speaker, and worked with groups to present about our professional development in our internships. I really enjoyed this class because the skills we learned are very applicable to the future, such as how to present to groups and how to complete a professional interview. Each week, this course had a different structure, so there was always something new to experience in the classroom. I also enjoyed the academic environment in London because there were students who came from many different schools across America, so everyone had taken different courses and experienced different teaching styles. This diversity created a very collaborative environment, because we all used our unique experiences from home to engage together in our classes in London. Another aspect that differed between my classes at Pitt and my classes in London was the time needed to get to class. At Pitt, I can get to all of my classes in about 15 to 20 minutes. However, because London is such a large city it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to get to class each day. I took the tube to class, so I also needed to ensure I left enough time if the train was delayed or other issues arose. Therefore, my classes in London were more time consuming than my classes in Pittsburgh because the commute was longer. With the commute I learned to love the tube and once I was used to it, the time passed quickly! Overall, it was a great experience to engage in a different course style than I do at my home institution, because it has made me a more well-rounded student who can learn in a variety of environments.
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