Explore the Global Public Health and Nursing Major

The joint major is how students like Fatmata Barrie can gain the comprehensive knowledge and skills they need to address inequities in patient care around the world. In high school Fatmata interned as an emergency medical technician in Washington, DC. Oxygen tanks were a standard part of her supplies. They were easily accessible and always available. However, when her great aunt in Sierra Leone needed an oxygen tank to help with her congestive heart failure, her family couldn’t find one. “They drove for miles and miles to find a tank,” Fatmata explains. “Meanwhile, we had expired tanks in DC that had never been used.” The fact that oxygen tanks are so readily available for use at home in the United States but not in Sierra Leone is one example of the health inequities that drew Fatmata to the Global Public Health and Nursing major at NYU.

This combined major has been around for years, but interest has increased recently, especially due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Fatmata, whose mother is a nurse, was drawn to the one-on-one nurse–patient relationship. But she also wanted to find a way to address health problems more holistically. “I want to be a part of more large-scale change,” she says. “Public health allows you to impact people in a very systematic and coordinated way.”

Jennifer Agmon, who is interested in working in a community health setting, says choosing the combined major at NYU was “the best decision” for her. “The nursing program itself is incredible,” she says. “And when you add on the global public health aspect, you really get this stronger sense of how you need to consider every different facet of somebody’s life to understand their health needs.”

Fatmata says she didn’t expect to be able to get significant public health experience as an undergraduate student. “I thought that was too lofty a goal,” she laughs. But through the Research Education in Cardiovascular Conditions Program, she’s already been involved in a National Institutes of Health–funded study on racial disparities in high blood pressure rates. She’s now working on a paper about the effects of perceived discrimination on blood pressure among African American mothers. What’s more, for her honors capstone guided by Associate Professor Victoria Vaughan Dickson, she will study the impact of mindfulness interventions on students with chronic diseases. Fatmata says those experiences have been invaluable. “This is something you do when you’re a PhD student,” she says.

Jennifer has also benefited from the Global Public Health and Nursing major’s emphasis on experiential learning. While studying abroad in Ghana, she analyzed an electronic waste site as part of an epidemiology class. When she returned to New York City, she wrote a paper about how best to mitigate health effects associated with the site for an environmental health class. “It’s a transformative experience to take what you’ve been studying and figure out how you can make a difference,” she says.