Lauria is the Assistant Director of Hokie Wellness at Virginia Tech. Whether in the classroom teaching, crafting school-wide awareness programs, or supervising her 30-student peer education team, Laurie is responsible for both educating students on health issues as well as teaching students how to become educators themselves . She tells interested students to get experience with peer-to-peer education as soon as possible to become comfortable learning, discussing, and then teaching big issues to fellow students.
Transcript
My name's Laurie Fritsch, and I am the Assistant Director in Hokie Wellness under student health education, so my primary roles are to supervise peer educators, both the Health Education and Awareness Team program and also the Body Project facilitators. I do a lot of program creation, implementation, and assessment. I teach a lot of health education workshops and classes, and then, of course, you have the final supervision administrative processes that go along with every job. So a lot of my work is throughout the mentorship of the Health Education and Awareness Team program. These are a group of 30 students who I train along with the other co-advisor of the program. We teach and train them on nutrition, STIs, contraception, tobacco, body image. These are really high-touch subjects. Students like to learn about sex from other students. Students like to learn about body image from other students because they're living that experience as well. And just to give students the opportunity to learn how to teach health is an awesome role to be in because they're going to take these skills and then use it with they're a doctor, or use it when they're a nurse, a dietician, or even when they're an engineer. You're always going to need teaching skills and be able to speak to someone else in a relatable manner. Our program really intertwines our student peer education group with everything that we do, so it could be that I'm going out to teach this information to academic classes or to other Division of Student Affairs departments, or it could be that I'm training our peer educators and then they're teaching it for collaborative efforts that we have with academic programs, so students receive credit for coming to our peer education programs. Right now, I would say my week consists of developing programs and new initiatives, trying to figure out places for larger outreach, kind of like the shorter outreach, teaching in classes, and then really coordinating the peer education program that I work with and training those students because we have a very high-touch mentorship program. I'm watching students and critiquing their presentation skills, so it's really a lot of teaching teachers as well.
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