Hello my name is Nicola Phelan and this audio pitch is highlighting how cardiovascular disease affects women. It includes 3 key points around the topic, and what way I believe this issue should be addressed.

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Where do I begin? What a jam packed module. I learned a lot of things about myself, my class and from the module. When I heard the module title I definitely panicked- I am far from tech savvy. I am actually a bit of a technology moron for a twenty year old college student living in the age of computers and smart phones. My other initial thoughts were how good my class mates are at tech, their PowerPoints often make mine look like they were created by a ten year old playing on their mothers laptop.

Nevertheless, the show goes on and all that jazz. It began with Marchathon. I loved getting people to sign up to it by manning the stand. The freebies may be what done it for us, but I couldn’t believe the uptake. Personally I think this might be down to how trendy counting your steps is these days. Also, its very easy to just sign a sheet, give your email and say you will take part. Give me the bloody bouncy ball and I’ll worry about the walking later. If I could go back in time I would have pushed the actual event more at this point, rather than just worrying about how many email addresses we got on the sheet. Maybe then people would have been more realistic about committing to it. All in all I did enjoy this part of Marchathon and with this error aside, I gave my best effort when recruiting.

Another part of the module which I thought I would crash and burn at was the online video about myself. The digital story telling task called ‘Who I am’, made me actually wonder who I was!? I didn’t know where to begin and who or what to put in the video. The UW Bothell students really excelled at this and set the bar high. My video was made on an app on my phone, which did the trick but definitely wasn’t anything amazing. If I could go back I would have used this opportunity to force myself to get familiar with Adobe Spark. This would have benefitted me more in the future instead of just being lazy by using the app on my phone. In saying that this task was more time consuming than I thought and I put the effort in trying to introduce rhyme and realism. I thought the fact that I put my vulnerable self in the story worked, and made it so much more relatable. I surprised myself by actually enjoying this project, it made me realise what family really is to me and how looking back on childhood is beneficial. Sometimes we all need to just take a break, release our inner child and do what we love.

After reflection I can see the real relationship between this module and my future career. Now I don’t actually know what my future career is, but hear me out. Technology is just growing and getting more and more important in every day life. This applies to the work place too. If you don’t have good written communication skills and the ability to present work online or through IT, you can forget about it. People don’t meet face to face as often anymore, being able to speak appropriately about work through email is an important one. This was something I learned in this module, that checking in with others you are doing tasks with regularly is vital to stay on top of things. On the flip side, being able to communicate face to face is essential too in Health Promotion. Public speaking in front of a large or small group will be something I will face over my career. I spoke at the launch of Marchathon in the gallery in front of a relatively small group, but I still found this extremely difficult. These small challenges do build up your confidence to face even bigger ones.

I may not know what path I’m taking, what job I will have, who I will work with and how long it will take to get there. All I do know is that I have learned that putting your self out there, stepping outside of your comfort zone and admitting you could have done bettter won’t ever be a waste of time. The media and technology is here to stay and so are people. It’s now my job to try and keep up with both.

As a college student, and a health promotion student at that, I think its utterly important that college campus’ a support students and staff to be healthy. In order to live our best lives, we need to study in a stimulating environment. The healthy campus charter created by Healthy Ireland is made up of quite a lot of fancy health jargon if you ask me. Don’t get me wrong, I know that health strategy’s and charters are important to give third level institutes the opportunity for guidance on health. How are they supposed to bloody understand it though? It is extremely vague if you ask me. Maybe this is a good thing, it gives the campus a chance to develop a healthy campus in a way that suits them.

Take point no. 10 for example. “We will create or re-orient campus services to support equitable access and enhance the health and wellbeing of students and staff.”

Ok, great. We will make a campus with loads of amazing healthy things, that will be really easy for members to use, and will make them so healthy?! Good translation? I’m not so sure. I know I’m not totally incorrect, but what are these “things” I am speaking about? What services should be put or changed on campus, that would be easy or everyone to access and benefit everybody’s health?

Nutritious healthy foods are essential in order to live a healthy lifestyle. The eat on campus services in WIT are definitely accessible, but I’m unsure are they all healthy. A carvery dinner for six euro that would feed a whole family might be sensational on hungover days, but is it what should be the easiest and cheapest option there? Generally the healthier the food, the more expensive it is. I am all about that balance but in order for people to have good nutrition most of the time, nutritious foods should be the main filler in the canteen. Barriers to this becoming the norm are that healthy foods don’t always sell so well, which might not make money for the canteen owners. They need to make a profit on these foods in order for them to stay in business, health isn’t their main concern!

Mental health services are also something that would enhance the health and wellbeing of students on campus. This is definitely something that should have easy access due to the stigma around it. Examples of these services would be counselling, guided meditation and stress management. Although the union do amazing work around mental health, professionals who are trained in this field would work so well directly in the setting. Counselling is available in WIT but just like everywhere the waiting list is dangerously long. Money, money, money. Once again this is the barrier to having these counsellors employed on campus. If the funding was there to pay them this would reduce the number of people on waiting lists on campus, and improve mental health in the college.

These are just two of the health services that could be available to the WIT population, there are so many other services that could be changed or put in place. Examples of these would be green spaces, seating areas and fitness classes at lunch hours in the sports hall. All of these things cannot be achieved without help from key stakeholders, and the sufficient funding. I hope that a wellbeing committee will expand in WIT in the future and some of these services may be enhanced or achieved some day. It takes more than just a health promotor or a charter to enhance a healthy campus. If it was that simple second year Health Promotion would have already changed WIT for the better!

When you think of your health, what comes to mind? Good nutrition, healthy foods, salads, exercising, regular visits to your GP, the list goes on and on. Does social connection even top the first twenty thoughts? I’m not sure it does. After this blog post you might think differently.

A lady who works in this field told me this statistic. Being lonely has the same effect on your health as smoking twenty cigarettes a day. I definitely consider smoking an unhealthy practice. So why don’t we hear about how important it is to stay social in the media? Well watch this space. This is definitely going to be the next big health initiative in Ireland, as the UK are already taking it very seriously.

This is the way I see it. When I think about life as a whole, and my health in general, I take many things into consideration. I could have an amazing physic, be extremely fit, eat nutritious foods, have no underlying health conditions … but if I had nobody around me, no friends, nobody to talk to, how happy would I be? Yes I might feel great physically but I am certain if I was lonely my mental health would suffer extremely. Research has been conducted into how being socially connected correlates with the use of health services. Stafford et al. (2018) found that the more socially connected an individual was, the more likely they would engage in a wide range of preventative health services. And we all know that prevention is much better than cure. This also relates to confidence, if you connect with others regularly, you are more likely to look after your physical health too. It’s a win win!

I am not saying that if you don’t have a multitude of friends and if you’re not super popular you are unhealthy. Definitely not the case. It could be as simple as having a hobby where you interact with others, you meet someone for a walk once a week, you meet with your family for a Sunday dinner. And not everyone does this unfortunately. There is always ways to stay connected though, it is always about making the first step. Local community centres and family resource centres are amazing for helping those who feel isolated. I hope there will be a huge push in the media soon for people to avail of these services. Everybody, needs somebody!

Stafford, M., von Wagner, C., Perman, S., Taylor, J., Kuh, D., & Sheringham, J. (2018). Articles: Social connectedness and engagement in preventive health services: an analysis of data from a prospective cohort study. The Lancet Public Health, 3, e438–e446. https://doi-org.ezproxy.wit.ie/10.1016/S2468-2667(18)30141-5

I was excited when I heard I would be recording my firsts ever radio ad as part of my assignment. This ad would be entered into a competition run by smarter travel. I had never heard of smarter travel, but the concept is that the ad will promote walking, cycling, using public transport or carpooling to college. The aim was to also include the theme of social connectedness. Although in the end I believe the ad was a success and myself and my team were delighted with the end product, there is definitely a couple of things we would do differently. Even though it would be so much easier for me not to slate myself right now, and just say that Rte. 2fm should have me on their breakfast show in the morning!

So before actually creating the ad, good research should have been done in relation to what social connectedness actually is. We didn’t do this. Hey, at least I’m honest. How it ran for us was we just came up with an idea and went with it. The concept of a carpool was something different than the usual get the bus and “make friends” idea, and could easily interoperate the idea of social connectedness. When making an ad that’s related to being connected, we proabably should have established what that exactly means to students in order to reach them through the ad. In fairness though, we are students ourselves, so we know it all… no need to bother with the research? Ok, maybe not. All jokes aside I do think radio was the best platform for the ad, as the characters we have chosen are dominated by their voices, and the ad is animated by the sounds.

I was proud of my contribution to the script, and my development of the characters. All four of us committed to finishing the script on the day we started it, and Clodagh typed it up on the template. In fairness she devoted her own time to this, and I didn’t. We created the entire script ourselves but Jenny gave her attention to it and helped us tweak it to sound better. It was quite clear at this point that her English skills are far better than ours! It wasn’t until we were actually in the studio recording, that it became so clear what needed to change on the script. Jenny brought us in on the first Friday and we did a few run throughs. I knew we had a solid idea, but after hearing it on record I was pleasantly surprised at how good it sounded! Like I said still waiting for the call of 2fm. Yes, any day now.

It was fairly last minute when we were told we would be in the studio recording the ad which would be the real deal. Exciting. We only had a couple of minutes in there the last day, so I couldn’t wait to hear the ad completed with sound effects and everything! The only time slot we had to do it was outside of our own timetable, which I was able to attend. Katie could not make this Friday which was a shame after the work she had put into the script. It took well over an hour to create the ad and it made me appreciate the work that goes into these sort of things, maybe I’m not cut out for 2fm after all. Only for Andrew and John Luca we couldn’t have done it. I felt their embarrassment when we asked them to use their voices in our ad, but they gladly did it. Not to blow my own trumpet once again, but I thought we did a really damn good job in the studio. We just threw all caution to the wind and ignored the awkwardness that was lingering. Although I don’t think I will ever get over having to fake laugh in front of a microphone multiple times- that must be embarrassing even for the professionals, hats off to them.

The final product sounded so professional, I couldn’t believe that we had made it, with extreme assistance, but still. Our new little radio baby. The final task awaited, this was to decide whether we would submit the version with heavy quirky sound effects, or the original one with very few basic sounds. After talking we decided to submit the original ad without the funny sounds. I was very vocal from the beginning that this was my preference, and I am glad nobody else was set on the latter as this helped us avoid our first radio team spat. Could you imagine the drama. On the day of submission. Shocking stuff. Myself and Sersha went to class that Friday and filled out the submission form, attached the clip, and boom, goodbye radio baby. A nice feeling to say the least.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton