What Does Public Health Really Mean? These High Schoolers Found Out

[Excerpt from article by By Michelle So & Jane E. Dee, April 30, 2026]

Fifty-nine high school students walked into the Yale School of Public Health on April 11 with only a general idea of what public health means. Some assumed it had something to do with diseases, maybe pandemics. By the end of the day, their understanding had grown to include topics such as gun violence, data use in urban planning, artificial intelligence, lead paint, and even the music playing in their earbuds.

That was exactly the point.

Public Health Day 2026, organized by YSPH’s Office of Community & Practice with Yale Pathways, a program of Yale University’s Office of New Haven Affairs, brought together students from across the region for a full day of hands-on workshops designed to expose them to the expansiveness of community-focused public health.

Public Health Day highlighted Yale School of Public Health’s commitment to reaching the next generation of potential public health leaders before they have chosen a path and showing them what the field looks like up close.

After just one workshop, Bryan Arriaga-Ventura of West Haven High School put it simply: “A career in public health means understanding how to support people,” he said.

[….]

Simulating the Impossible Choices Behind Public Health Policy

In a session led by DataHaven’s Youth Advisory Council, students became community decision-makers. Armed with real data on food access, transportation, environmental conditions, and youth health across New Haven neighborhoods like the Hill, East Rock, and Fair Haven, they had to decide how to spend limited resources — and then adapt when unexpected events threw their strategies off course.

“To me, public health is bringing equity to neighborhoods — sociologically, geographically,” said Saanika Tipnis, a Youth Advisory Council member and incoming biometry and statistics student at Cornell. “It’s how policy is used to ensure people aren’t disadvantaged because of where they live.”

For Siri Sameet and Jackson Gelfand, both first-year students at Amity High School, the simulation introduced something new. Their strategy for the Hill neighborhood included adding speed bumps to reduce pedestrian injuries and stocking pharmacies with Narcan.

“Before, I wasn’t aware that public health meant stopping car crashes,” Sameet said.

“I thought public health was all biological — diseases — and less urban planning,” Gelfand added.

By the end of the day, the question posed in the morning—what does public health mean?—was answered not with a single definition, but with many. Lead paint and TikToks. Music lyrics and overdose kits. Data simulations and a student’s quiet hand raised in a room full of strangers.

“Before, I only thought public health meant pandemics,” said Giancarlos Hernandez, a 14-year-old first-year studentat Notre Dame High School. “Now I know public health is everything — food, gun violence, everything.”