Image Credits: West Chester University
The Health and Wellness Expo presented at West Chester University is an event designed to enhance knowledge among students through peer-learning activities and workshops. This year’s expo was held in the SECC building on Nov. 12, which turned out to be a huge success for vendors and organizers. Public health professors Dr. Rebecca Rich and Dr. Jayme Trogus created this event in 2022 and it has progressed every year since. “We met in 2021 and soon realized that we both shared a common interest in student well-being,” Dr. Rich said. “We wanted to find a way to bring students together for community belonging as well as learning about health and wellness skills.”
When asked about first year expectations of the expo, Dr. Trogus states, “Creating an opportunity to combine students and academic affairs was something exciting while also engaging students from a peer-to-peer perspective. Looking back, I was really happy with the outcome and excited regarding the feedback we received to potentially continue this event moving forward.” Aside from Dr. Rich and Dr. Jayme, student project leader, Nikki Anandan, played a huge role in organizing the event. Through careful planning and evaluation, the first expo was seen as a “pilot event” based on the number of participants, which turned out to be hundreds of students.
For students who have little to no knowledge about this event, peer to peer education is really important when it comes to the expo. Anandan states, “Learning from other peers would be described as a useful way to gain resources on and off campus. This would eventually sustain different levels of wellness for students through the use of hands-on activities and other interactive engagement.”
Dr. Trogus adds, “For students, particularly studying the health sciences, it’s important to learn how to deliver information as part of a professional job or career within the public health field.”
When asked about potential challenges regarding planning the expo, Dr Trogus stated, “I think the only challenge sometimes is often post-event planning since we mainly consider what things can be done differently the following year. The SECC is a wonderful building and beneficial to the event since it’s the home of the college and health sciences while also being used to enhance the opportunities to engage people in future years.”
Since the expo is a relatively big event, the best way to prepare is building partnerships all year round and brainstorming ideas for the next event. For this year’s Health and Wellness Expo Dr. Rich, Dr. Trogus and Anandan all had different roles in preparing for the event. “I see my role as a liaison between faculty and students such as communicating with professors to encourage their own students to participate as well as attend the event,” Dr. Rich states. “A lot of my work included thinking about the overarching themes of the event. It was a line of communication between students and faculty while also planning the map and figuring out the layout of the vendor tables,” Anandan says. “My role specifically I see it as a logistics role and making sure that structure and organization is put in place to ensure positive outcomes,” Dr. Trogus adds.
A team effort was well organized in advance between organizers, volunteers, vendors and campus departments to depict who’s responsible for different aspects of the event. College of the health sciences administration is a big support system towards the expo by making sure everything is taken care of to ensure success each year as well as mini grant opportunities. “Institutional commitment from student affairs and college of the health sciences were able to trust us to organize something like this and it’s a valuable use of student time. Faculty giving extra credit to students by advising them to participate not only shows that it’s a great learning experience but highlights the financial resources that we are provided with to boost the event,” Dr. Trogus mentions.
When asked about future improvements recommended for next year’s expo, Dr. Rich hopes to achieve a lot more outreach regarding students at other universities and health departments in general to maybe do something similar to the expo. “Looking through and evaluating survey feedback, recommendations were related to layout changes within the SECC building and potentially finding better strategies to design a visual map layout of vendor tables throughout the building,” Anandan states. Additionally, Dr. Trogus mentions, “Thinking about other colleges and health departments, continuing to reflect the needs of students while thinking broadly about how the dimension of wellness can be portrayed in that specific space is valuable.”
One of the main takeaways that organizers hope for students to gain is the importance of learning about multiple topics related to wellness and accessible resources that can accommodate your specific needs. Dr. Rich closes the interview with a statement, “It’s very rewarding for me as professor to see our students grow so much in their confidence and self efficiently as health educators, just within a 2-hour event.” Dr. Rich continues, “It’s one thing to plan ahead of time but when you’re actually at the event, getting to see students interact with each other is a proud feeling overall to witness every year.”
Imirah Jackson is a fourth year public health major and journalism minor, IJ977006@wcupa.edu