During the five years she worked as a high school geography and history teacher near Provo, Utah, Natalie Matthews loved introducing students to new cultures and ways of seeing the world.
“I traveled to Europe, South America and even took students to Kenya last summer, which was my favorite travel experience,” says Matthews. Who is in her first year of the DGHI Master of Science in Global Health program. On the Kenya trip, her students learned about sustainable development and ecotourism and volunteered in community service projects.
But while those trips were intended to expand her students’ perspectives, they also sparked Matthews’ own desire to understand different cultures and to see global health systems at work. “I gained interest in global health after teaching a lot about population health in my classes. I liked seeing the bigger picture and all the different determinants that were affecting health,” she says.
In 2023, Matthews decided to give up teaching and pursue her own education. She wanted an opportunity to deepen her understanding of health systems through international experience, and the DGHI program’s emphasis on fieldwork and research clinched the deal.
But it took a while for Matthews, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history at Brigham Young University, to feel at home at Duke. “I had imposter syndrome when I joined the program,” she says. “Many people had come from the Medical field and that made me feel inadequate,”
Matthews says she has come to appreciate the diversity of students in the program. Discussions in class are filled with different kinds of expertise and views from various countries giving the lessons a rich outlook, she notes.
She’s also discovered new interest in data science. She took coding courses as an undergraduate and at Duke has been learning the programming language R. “I am also fortunate that my partner does a lot of coding and I enjoy looking over his shoulder to see what he is doing. That helps a lot with my skills,” she says.
Matthews says she finds statistics interesting because it has a structured approach to analyzing data and drawing conclusions, based on mathematical principles. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in statistics and epidemiology, but she is also involving herself in research to keep her options open.
Matthews says her work experience was valuable in improving her time management skills. Also, working in a public school has allowed her to look at how large systems operate, which she applies to understanding how health providers function within a larger, complex system.
But global health does present new challenges from what she experienced in school, she says. Outcomes in school are easy to monitor, in terms of the percentage of students who got a question right. Global health has metrics that can be at times amorphous and subjective, she notes.
