When professor John Fitzgerald asked students in his advanced economics class this semester —Economic Evaluation of Public Programs — whether any would like to volunteer, for no academic credit, to help a local healthcare clinic analyze some of its patient data, three students promptly signed up.
Oasis Free Clinics was seeking help to compare information it had about some of its patients’ childhood histories — in particular, the traumas they may have experienced in youth — with information collected from a more general population. The clinic provides free dental and medical care to low-income, uninsured people in the greater Brunswick region.
Fitzgerald, who is Bowdoin’s William D. Shipman Professor of Economics, said he tries to incorporate community projects into his economics classes when he can. “I think it helps the students see that organizations deal with real questions about how to use data or how to interpret information that we teach about,” he said. “It helps the community, and it helps the students.”
[For more on this story by Rebecca Goldfine, go to http://community.bowdoin.edu/n...-free-health-clinic/]
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