UMN Trainee Spotlight: Yetunde Akingbemi and Noelle Yeo

This blog post describes the experiences of two MCH nutrition trainees, Noelle Yeo and Yetunde Akingbemi, while attending the Making Lifelong Connections meeting in Tampa, Florida this spring. Noelle and Yetunde are second year students in the coordinated MPH Nutrition program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. They have both been MCH nutrition trainees since August 2017.

Making Lifelong Connections is a meeting for all MCHB trainees to connect with current and former trainees, share and learn from each others’ work, and practice and learn leadership skills. All current and former trainees are selected to attend this meeting to demonstrate a form of leadership through giving an poster or oral presentation, hosting a roundtable discussion, introducing speakers, or other forms of leadership activities. Noelle and Yetunde – along with Marissa McElrone from UTK – originally applied to attend to present their work on creating and administering this blog. We were selected to host a roundtable discussion during the meeting entitled “Leadership Colors” where we led our respective tables in completing the activity to discover our leadership styles. We discussed how to apply our various leadership styles to our current work, and also examined how our strengths could benefit different work environments during our future careers. Here is more about our experiences at MLC:

Noelle: Attending MLC this spring was a great experience. We had the opportunity to meet and learn from so many people in different disciplines of MCHB training programs. At the beginning of the meeting, we were all given a ring of cards with our information on it to hand out as we were talking to new people. It was immediately clear (as from the name of the conference) that networking would be a large part of the conference, but the cards and the activities made it easy and fun! I really enjoyed getting outside of the nutrition realm and learning about the work that current and former trainees are doing in other programs. Some of my favorite presentations were about about making public places (particularly restaurants and the Cleveland zoo) more accessible and welcoming for people with various mental abilities. We also were able to support two of our classmates from the UMN Center for Leadership in MCH who presented their work with the Lactation Advocacy Committee and researching sexual activity among LGBTQIA+ youth experiencing homelessness. Overall, the meeting was an awesome opportunity. I hope to attend next year and would encourage anyone interested in applying as well!

Yetunde: The MLC meeting far exceeded my expectations this spring. As soon as the conference began, I was astonished by the number of training programs that were represented, many of which I wasn’t aware existed! It was wonderful to meet such a wide variety of people – of different races and ethnicities – that were involved in MCH in some capacity. As was mentioned previously, the networking ring of cards was a very creative way to get to know and connect with people! Many specific moments at MLC especially stuck with me. I really liked a presentation given by a social worker on how he applied his MCH training to reduce violence at the public school at which he worked. Another was about using Mhealth interventions to improve prenatal care and birth outcomes in the US. Overall, it was clear that each speaker had a passion for the topics they were presenting, and many even told their personal stories and journeys, which was very inspiring to hear. Attending this meeting fueled my love for MCH even further, and I am already looking forward for the opportunity to attend next year!