COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SCIENCES SCHOLARSHIP PORTFOLIO (2013) | Page 33

Patrick Chang, CHSS Graduate Distinguished Achievement Award, MPH
Program, Department of Health Education, 2013
Patrick Chang is a public health educator with more than 10 years of K-12 and
higher education teaching experience working with low-income communities
of color. During his years in the MPH program, Patrick made significant
contributions to underserved communities as a lecturer with the Dept. of Health
Education’s Metro Academies Initiative. Metro Academies are schools within
schools that give low-income, first-generation, under-represented students
a personalized educational home during the first two years of college—the
critical time when large numbers of underserved students drop out. In addition,
Patrick collaborated with Dr. Mary Beth Love, Vicki Legion, and their team
of researchers on a Metro cost-efficiency study, a report demonstrating that
Metro Academies is an efficient model for higher education that produces more
college graduates per unit of cost. For his culminating experience, Patrick
extended the discussion of Metro Academies’ cost-efficient model of higher
education. His research project contributes to our understanding of institutional
responsibility in supporting and prioritizing the academic achievement of
historically underserved and marginalized students, and recommends that
CSU’s practices shift in order to align with its stated mission. Patrick’s
extraordinary abilities were recognized by division directors in San Francisco’s
Department of Public Health, Office of Policy and Planning, who designated
Patrick as lead on several large-scale departmental projects, which included
assessing and drafting a final report of DPH’s infrastructure and capacity to
address obesity in San Francisco, and leading DPH’s efforts to comply with its
Healthy Vending policy. Immediately after graduation, Patrick started his new
post as health policy and research coordinator for the Great Basin Primary Care
Association.

Sarah Wongking, CHSS Graduate Distinguished Achievement Award, MPH
Program, Department of Health Education, 2013
As a lecturer in the Metro Academies and undergraduate Health Education
programs at SF State, Sarah engages students in a transformative learning
process that encourages critical dialogue and reflection, promotes policy
activism among health education students, and works with students to articulate
the ways in which their education is relevant to their professional growth. As
a member of the Metro Academy’s Faculty Learning Community Leadership
Team, Sarah and her co-leaders plan, facilitate and evaluate community
trainings and lead reflective discussions about teaching practices for more
than 30 faculty from various disciplines and experiential backgrounds. Sarah’s
culminating experience was a position paper exploring both the importance and
role of community within the classroom setting, and the multi-layered causes
of disengaged learning using an ecological model as a guide.
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DEPARTMENTS

Ripa Saha, Undergraduate Honoree, Department of Health Education, 2013
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