Allyson Naiken
Allyson Naiken studied abroad in the Netherlands for four weeks where she took a Public Health class that was held at the University of Amsterdam. The class itself explored a variety of topics such as the operations of health care facilities, the drug usage rates in the Netherlands in comparison to the United States, and the education system to understand how one obtains a career in the health care field, which was also compared to the American system. After class, she had the opportunity to participate in site visits to various health care facilities which enabled her to truly understand how the Dutch health care system operates. Of the many places she got to visit, her favorites were the nursing home, a psychiatry facility, and the GGD (which is a government program that provides a variety of health services). As one of her assignments for class, she had the option to interview locals on a topic of her choice. She chose to interview them on their perspective of the Dutch health care system and what their perspective was on the American system, which also helped her understand what they thought on the differences between the two and if they thought one was better than the other. On the weekends and in her spare time she visited a few other cities in the Netherlands such as Rotterdam, Haarlem, and Gouda. A few of her favorite moments included driving a boat through the canals of Amsterdam, attending a cheese tasting class, and being able to visit the Anne Frank house.
CEE Title: Politics Around the World
The CEE conducted focused on politics around the world, highlighting the countries my fellow awardees and I studied abroad in which included the Netherlands, China, and the U.K. We individually created presentations on the countries we went to including their political structure, important people, and voting turnout rates. Before we did our presentations we did a continuum where we asked participants to stand on a line in respect to how free they thought the country was. After they sat down, we went through the presentation, and we used data from Freedom House which has maps that represent how free (politically) a country is. We discussed the results from each of our countries and compared them to the United States. In each of our presentations we also included a copy of the Freedom Map that depicted political freedom and we went through the results of our countries as well as the United States. Although, on the map they could look at the other countries and see how free they were in comparison to the ones discussed and copies were provided at the end of the presentation. At the end of the presentation of each country we did a second continuum asking if anyone had changed their mind in how free they thought that country was. After, we played a game of Jeopardy where we included questions from the presentations as well as other international trivia. We had a guest speaker, Dr. Maryam Deloffre, who spoke about the voting systems in each country. We came up with three questions that were handed out in envelopes to each table, also assigning them one of the three countries we went to. The participants were asked to think about each question in the mindset of the country they were assigned to. To conclude the CEE we took any final questions from the audience and then thanked everyone for their support.