Symposium day 11: Mountains, views, and what’s next for the symposium

With May 1 being a national holiday in India, students were able to spend Wednesday relaxing and exploring Udupi region. The hard-working group from Manipal Academy of Higher Education organized yet another successful event, this time an excursion to view some of the area’s top attractions. First stop on the whirlwind tour: the impressive Shri Bhagwan Bahubali Digambar Jain Statue. From the courtyard outside of the monument, the spectacular view of the surrounding mountains was truly breathtaking. The Thousand Pillar Jain Temple served as the second and final stop of the trip.

Upon entering, students couldn’t help but notice the unmistakable sense of serenity etched into its walls. The group enjoyed a stroll throughout the grounds before piling into the buses to head back to campus. All in all, the excursion provided the perfect escape on this beautiful May holiday. 

Q & A with Arithi Rao, coordinator of MPH program for Prasanna School of Public Health, Manipal Academy of Higher Education

Q: Next year it is going to be a 10 year anniversary. What new things can be expected?

A: It’s very heartening to know that it’s going to be a decade since the Global Health Symposium started. We wish to continue and recently we had a meeting with the VC and all the faculties across the universities.

We used to be only 3M’s before- Manipal, Mc Master and Maastricht, but now we have another official partner Ahfad University for Women, Sudan where faculty and students participated in the symposium along with representatives from Thammasat University, Thailand, University of South Eastern university, Norway, University of Sydney and many other delegates are visiting us and are very interested to see how this symposium is shaping up.

I hope in the 10th year we have more partners and we hope the observers this year will participate as official partners. This year we also have a new cluster One Health which is well taken and important.

Student Spotlight: Ciarán Mooney

The modules in the elective track at Thammasat were quite varied. We started the year off with a module on globalization and went on to have further modules which included migrant and refugee health, the political economy of global health, human rights and global health and disease outbreak and control. The 2-week long module structure was very different to other electives and was one of the reasons I chose the elective at Thammasat.

The opportunity to study such a wide range of modules on different aspects of global health allowed us to develop interests outside of those we might have experienced. Engaging in such a large number of modules meant that we had the opportunity to be taught by some really experienced and interesting tutors from different walks of life including the medical, NGO and legal professions.

A number of the academic staff had held positions at renowned organizations such as WHO, UNICEF, UN AIDS and The CDC. Hearing real-life stories from the field was really interesting and put our learning into perspective. Getting to explore Thailand was an added-benefit of the elective. It’s such a beautiful country with so many things to offer: delicious food, kind people, interesting culture and beautiful nature, to name a few.

The most prominent part of my elective experience which I have applied a at the symposium is working in international teams. At Thammasat, we had a really diverse group from Northern America, Europe, Africa and Asia. That blending of cultures, opinions and experiences was a driving force behind some really productive group work. I see the same thing here at the symposium, where people from all walks of life and corners of the planet have come together to produce some incredible work — the organization of the conference, the research proposal presentations and of course, the system maps

The Student Communications Committee