Maya Salameh ‘22

I worked on a series of community accessible deliverables for the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, a project I led and completed mostly self-directed. This project included completing readings on language accessibility and summarizing scientific findings, iteration in Canva, discussing and analyzing my own methodology and research design, and feedback meetings with multiple members of the ACCESS research team. I was also able to meet with some of my supervisors to learn more about life as a nonprofit employee, and learned more about communicating my research aims and ethics.

My main learning plan objectives were to: 

• To apply knowledge I gained in my academic projects to practical issues of service; 
• Learn more about the landscape of Arab-American health more generally and evaluate any gaps I see in the literature as I approach my graduate research career; 
• Learn about how a community-focused organization navigates serving a population without a Census designation; 
• Observe my supervisors to see how a full-time career in service looks like; 
• Gain more technical fluency in data coding and visualization in NVIVO; 
• Deepen my values around how I want to approach community-based research accessibility and dissemination;
• Develop a more specific career ethos for how I want my research to be communicated, used, and applied. 

I was able to achieve these objectives in multiple ways. 

Firstly, being able to translate my research from a less accessible, more dense 80-page thesis format into a short deliverable allowed me to gain practice in presenting and discussing my research for lay and non-academic audiences, which helps me to apply my research findings to more vulnerable populations / less privileged ones. 

I also learned more about the landscape of Arab American health through my discussions with my supervisor, who also informed and invited me to the annual Arab Health Conference. I learned more about the workload and projects of ACCESS employees, whose responsibilities included advocacy as well as research dissemination and application. I learned that a career in service could still be a thoroughly academic one, and that my research goals were not incompatible with a future in nonprofit work. I also learned that I hope to work such a multifaceted career, which allows me to both conduct Arab American - focused research as well as apply it and disseminate it to the community.