Career Services Spotlight Transcripts

RECORDING OF: YouTube Video Career Spotlight: Embracing Challenges and Finding Success in Public Health

TRANSCRIBED: March 20, 2015

FOR: Walden University

MERILEE S. JOHNSON, RMR, CRR, CBC, CCP PARADIGM REPORTING & CAPTIONING, INC. 612.339.0545 CAPTION@PARADIGMREPORTING.COM >>

(Denise)
Hello, I'm Denise Pranke, a career service advisor at Walden University. I met Nathaniel Geyer as a residency and worked with him through a serious of career advising appointments. He shares with us, his story about overcoming challenges, and building his reputation in the field of public health.

(Nathaniel)
Nathaniel Reid Geyer. Public health, concentration in epidemiology. It's a Ph.D. Research support technologist and contractor at the Department of Health. First of all, I wanted to share that I was diagnosed at age 9 with an autism spectrum disorder, and I -- I'm happened to be at the right place over the right time over the years. For example, when I was in second grade, I had a teacher who said, "You're too smart for the school, you can be mainstream" because I virtually was not. And I've been mainstreamed for most of my career. What prompted me and -- to go into public health from the basic science background, my bachelor's was in biology, especially in ecology, which is very populational-based, but also deals with the non-human population. I wanted to reach out and inspire people, like I was inspired, like pay it forward. I work with the Department of Health as a contractor, but I'm actually funded by a local university, Penn State College of Medicine, In Hershey Pennsylvania. But I'm stationed 12 miles away in Harrisburg. I worked with Denise in career services and she helped me with polishing my resumé with developing my LinkedIn profile. I also used the webinars. And through subsequent residencies with Lisa, and now Dina, I also got some more feedback on my resumé and my LinkedIn profile. I graduated with my master's thesis in obesity. I spent the summer working on it. The fall came around and I started a new job and that was put on hold for about three years. I talked with Denise, and then a few months later, I submitted my publication for review at a lower-tiered journal because I didn't want to go into the higher tier right away, and it got accepted. I had to do some corrections, but I persevered and resubmitted it and it got published. My conference proposal was accepted by this conference at OMIC (phonetic) and also I had other Walden course work proposal that I worked with four others in my research course, and at group project I submitted that to a conference, it got accepted in Baltimore was that virology conference for HIV and ageing in Baltimore, Maryland. And then I submitted that for publication, so actually I have two. And also my job, I have several publications in the form of conferences. We haven't been able to publish them because of time restrictions, but at least we have them in the abstract form in posters. And one of them actually was an oral presentation that was done with three abstracts at the HIV Summit in 2013. Develop your career. It's okay to learn from failures, as long as you pick yourself up and succeed.

[This text is being provided in a rough-draft format to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings]