-: Epidemiology is about, you know...
Medicine's at an individual level
and epi is at a population level,
so instead of just treating the symptoms of a problem,
I can look upstream a little bit
and try to prevent the cases of diseases
from happening in the first place.
So, I really love that about epi.
About, you know, trying to prevent disease
and being ahead of the outbreaks.
And I get to learn new things all the time.
Most emerging or new diseases are actually
related to animals or insects.
So, for example, when Zika came to the Americas
a couple of years ago,
I was expected to be the subject matter expert
for the state for Zika.
So I got to do a lot of studying and learning
and I get to work with people at the CDC,
a lot of really smart people.
So even when it's super stressful,
I still kind of sit back and I'm like this is really cool.
Along the same lines, we are kind of behind the scenes
until an outbreak or something bad happens.
So I think one of the challenges
is to not take that personally.
We can be kind of unsung heroes.
And then when something bad happens, an outbreak happens,
we're kind of in the front lines
and it's about, you know, bad news
rather than good news.
So that can be a challenge.
And obviously working in the government,
we have limited resources.
We're not funded as well as our colleagues in industry,
private industry are,
so, the challenges that we have to kind of work
within the resources that we have
so we have to be very creative about how we get things done.
And we have to juggle many balls at the same time,
and you kind of have to be a Jack of all trades.
And kind of know a lot of different things
to be able to work within your resources.