Rebecca Robbins (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 74C (Fall Term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
BREAKING: Coffee causes cancer! THIS JUST IN: Microplastics in our brains!
Making sense of – and coping with – the often conflicting and seemingly ever-changing information we receive from various sources on health and medical topics can be hard. This seminar will give you the skills to make sense of health and medical information and this seminar will give you the skills to communicate health and medical information effectively to others using new and novel media. Whether you are interested in a career as a social media content creator on TikTok, a medical journalist for the New York Times, a surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, or you are simply interested in being a better consumer of medical information, this seminar is for you.
In this seminar, you will learn about how health information is developed for traditional (e.g., newspapers, television) and non-traditional (e.g., TikTok, YouTube) media outlets. You will visit a newsroom, meet health journalists, and learn how journalists craft health content for newspapers, television, and online publications. You will also meet the creator of the #1 podcast in the world and visit her studio in Boston. You will hear from YouTube-funded health content creators and learn their tricks for communicating health information that empowers their online communities. The seminar will also wrestle with the power structures that adjudicate which health topics are covered in the media and discuss the imperative of defending vulnerable populations and considering culture and literacy levels in health content creation.