This course gave me a more in-depth look into the ethics of many medical cases that evaluate the ethics and morals of the decisions made by physicians and the law. The world isn’t black and white, especially in the world of medicine. There is a gray space or area in almost every situation because every circumstance is individualized. When I took this course, I was fresh out of high school, graduated a month before taking this class, and expanded my understanding of what medical professionals deal with daily. This course starts my exploration into argumentation and sound arguments while also teaching me that there is a difference between what is just and what is right. This course ties heavily into my Social Justice that & the City course.

The links below lead to my final presentation and paper from this course: Conversion Therapy

Consent vs Refusal

I chose this course because during my time as a student under Professor Rouse, a part of our curriculum was going to events and “appraising,” essentially writing a short paper discussing the event and how it related to the theme or topic(s) of our class. Professor Jackie Smith was one of the speakers of the event I went to appraise, and it led me down a path in which I became more involved in human rights work.

In this specific course with Professor Smith, I received a more in-depth understanding of the social determinants of health and how health inequities and inequalities are produced as well as reproduced. We discussed global key actors, the role of the UN, and also Jackie’s work with the Universal Periodic Review and the Pittsburgh Human Rights City Alliance.  At the time I took this course, I didn’t know it would lead me to become an intern for Jackie for this amazing organization during my senior year. This door was my opportunity into working with activists and learning more about how important grass-root movements are. However, this course also showed me that there have always been people doing the work to make substantial change, we just have to use our resources and abilities correctly to provide them the support needed to uplift their voices and work.

As an Urban Studies major, this was one of my favorite courses to take with Professor Susan Lucas. This course provided the background I needed for my research paper in Urbnst 1300. Professor Lucas discussed Hostile Architecture’s notion and physical presence; it’s a concept that I used in a few research papers because it’s a concept that integrates a variety of urban issues that are often not discussed. Still, it’s also a topic that can permeate into a lot of other discussions/conversations.

We as a class discussed hostile architecture because it was a part of Professor Lucas’s main topics for the semester, which was known as “the Cruel City”. This course provided the opportunity to do a premature version of fieldwork, our end of the semester project was based on the fieldwork we did for our chosen research question. It was a relatively unstructured course which was a challenge because the only real structure came from a loose rubric, everything else was based on the collaboration and work done with our perspective groups.

The topics we discussed in this class per the title have similarities or can be traced to other urban cities. One of my favorite moments or discussions from this course is through how hostile architecture is discriminatory towards the homeless and those we identify as skateboarders. When we discussed this, I wasn’t surprised when it came to the treatment of the homeless, but I was intrigued by how skaters were affected. Another interesting aspect was that this research that professor Lucas shared with us, came from one of her past students!

The Cruel Campus

I am currently in this course, but Grant Writing is an area I have had some experience in, in the past. Taking this course refines not only my writing but also the skill of grant writing. When I wrote my first grant proposal, it was unstructured and there was no real guideline or expert I could consult. The most challenging aspect of this course is making a proposal that is digestible for its audience while simultaneously providing all the info necessary. Improving my grant writing skills will also prove to be beneficial in my field of human rights and medicine since grant proposals make a lot of research and resources available.

The proposal I am currently working on correlates to the research I have done in the past in terms of enhancing Community Engagement at the university level through using evidence-based research. The proposal has ties to the research from my Act fellowship and my research paper for my Urban Seminar course.

I took two mini-courses with the final papers attached.

• The first one was about Global Cities; this mini-course that Professor Roger Rouse encouraged me to attend was what pushed me to switch my major to Urban Studies. For this mini-course, I focused on writing my Global City Analysis paper on Istanbul, Turkey, because our focus was on understanding the interdisciplinary environments cities play in our world. Global cities are conduits for convergence, universal trends, and rapid growth through globalization; unlike nations, global cities serve as hubs for competitive globalized systems.   Something that has always stuck with me was when professor Michael Glass (a speaker at the mini-course) stated that cities are nothing without people. That statement has been carried out through every piece of social science research I’ve conducted throughout my time at Pitt.
  • Global Cities
• The second mini-course was on Global Health and Climate Change. This course not only discussed the interconnectedness that I had seen and discussed in my previous courses, but it tied with my internships/fellowships, more specifically with the Millenium Fellowship because it linked in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the UN. Unlike other courses I’ve taken, this was the first time I wrote a policy memo, which was a bit challenging considering how short a policy memo is meant to be with all the information you have to discuss.
  • Policy Memo

Urban studies 1300 was a course dedicated to refining my research skills. This course honed our skills in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed research methods where we/I can build off a framework to conduct our own research. My research focus was more qualitative rather than quantitative, the research I conducted was based on hostile architecture. It was a topic that professor Susan Lucas discussed during my time in her World Urban Patterns course.

The topic of my research questioned how Public and Private space influenced Higher Education in Pittsburgh. In this project, the simple meanings of public vs. private space were used to understand how urban universities influence these spaces. In turn, it questions the impact it has on lower-income communities that are neighbors to three major universities in Allegheny County; The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), Carnegie Mellon (CMU), and Duquesne University. The links below are of a poster on my research and a paper dedicated to my research.

Poster Urban Studies 1300

Final Paper Urban Studies 1300

In this section please write about a course you took over and above the 5 required courses relevant to your global theme. Below are some questions to consider. You do not need to answer each one, or answer them in a numbered form, but working with them can help you formulate a coherent idea of your certificate as a whole:

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