Sophie Baggett ’23 is a senior biology major and Spanish minor from La Crosse, Wisconsin. She has been a Fellow in the CCCE for the past three years, splitting her time between the Academic Civic Engagement cohort and the Health and Belonging cohort. Sophie is also a member of the Women’s Swim Team, Water Polo Team and Carleton Pre-Health Association. Sophie is a finalist for a Fulbright where she will be traveling to Chile to work with labs at the Universidad de la Frontera to build on their current research of Heliobacter pylori (H. pylori) in the La Araucanía region using bioinformatic analyses, in vitro experiments, and interviews with community members.
Through your time at Carleton you’ve been involved in community engagement and the CCCE on multiple levels — tell us about your journey in the CCCE.
During my first year at Carleton, I didn’t really know anything about Northfield. I stayed on campus, went to my classes and went to the pool, and that was what I did. I saw the opportunity to deepen my connection with the Northfield community and to get involved with something bigger than myself by coming to work at the CCCE. I started in the Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) cohort and then moved on to split my time between the Health and Belonging and the ACE cohorts. I’ve also gotten to do a couple of cool things through the CCCE — I got to be an Alternative Spring Break trip leader and go to Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center and do the Four Friends Fellowship. It’s been awesome.
Community engagement work doesn’t have to be separate from other things that I’m passionate about … community engagement can be a part of that work and a dimension of that work.”
One of the biggest things that I’ve learned through my time working here is that community engagement work doesn’t have to be separate from other things that I’m passionate about and that I care about—such as health care and connecting with folks across languages and cultures. And now I have a hard time imagining my future career without that dimension of the work.
You’ve been involved in many community engagement projects, initiatives, and programs both within and outside of the CCCE. What are some of your biggest accomplishments or most memorable moments?
CNA: One that comes to mind right away is the certified nursing assistant (CNA) project — working to create an opportunity for Carleton students to get their CNA training here in Northfield to hopefully use that training to meet the community identified need of getting more CNAs and people in those types of positions. That’s been really powerful, especially because of my own experience. My first couple of years of college, I worked at the nursing home in my hometown, as a CNA on breaks. It was really meaningful to me to be able to help other Carleton students into this work and create the opportunity for them. And I learned so much about working with community partners through that and the flexibility that’s required on every end to be able to make something work that meets everyone’s goals.
Undergraduate Research: I had the opportunity last summer to go to Peru and I used a lot of what I’ve learned in the CCCE. I was definitely thinking about the Ideas of mutual benefit and reciprocity both through the project and also myself personally. I worked with Dr. Sarah Kennedy, who’s in the archaeology department at Carleton, and she’s doing some really awesome work investigating heavy metals that might be present in colonial silver refining sites in Peru. I, however, don’t know anything about archaeology, the techniques, methods or theory, but I did have some knowledge about community engagement skills, and I did have the ability to speak Spanish.
Dr. Kennedy was starting to get results and seeing that, yes, there are some elevated levels of heavy metals. I came in to maintain existing connections and initiate new connections with the Puno (the city in Perú where the work was being done) community stakeholders and investigate—what is the best way to give this information to the community in a way that will be productive and generative and not panicking or overwhelming or inaccessible? The original idea when I proposed this fellowship was to have conversations, make informational fliers and then pass them out within two weeks—that was pretty ambitious. What I learned from the CNA program is flexibility. We can start off with a plan for what our work is going to be and a time frame, but we might have to adapt. We ended up finding out that there were a lot more stakeholders and actors at play than we initially thought. We had some enlightening conversations with governmental health agencies involved, the governmental mining agency, and some NGOs. I learned that it wasn’t going to be possible for us to distribute these fliers if we wanted to take our time and do a good job within the timeline we had set. But we can make a draft and bring it to these meetings and we can work on refining that draft.
For me personally, this experience was a great opportunity to build and practice my skills, but for the people who are taking the time out of their day to have these conversations with me—what are they gaining from these conversations? I was trying to keep that in mind throughout the project and work towards that as a goal.
What’s next for you? What have you learned in the CCCE that you hope to bring into your future career?
Fulbright: I feel really lucky to have been named a finalist for the Fulbright Science Initiative in Chile program. The project that I proposed is working with researchers at the Universidad de la Frontera, which is in the central area of Chile in the La Araucanía region, to study a bacteria that causes stomach ulcers, which sometimes can predispose someone to having stomach cancer in the future. The project is to use genetic analysis to understand why some folks are predisposed to stomach cancer and some aren’t. The eventual goal of the project being to come up with a diagnostic tool to be able to find that out. I wanted to incorporate an interview component, community conversation component, or community involvement component too because the university is not the only stakeholder in this project. If there were a diagnostic tool eventually developed, it would need to be developed so that it could be used and relevant to the community in the area.
Career in Medicine: For my long term career, I know I’m interested in medicine. I don’t know whether that will take me to seeing patients in the clinic or doing clinical research or both, but I know that in any doctor’s appointment mutual respect is something to keep in mind. Even acknowledging sources of knowledge is important. As a future doctor, I would have the knowledge of medical school, but also the patient is coming in with knowledge. They know their body, they know what’s going on with them, and they know what they’re looking for from that appointment.
I didn’t think when I first started in the CCCE that it would have been what it has been. When I first started in the CCCE my thoughts about the future were around the idea of going to medical school and being in the clinic and not much outside of that—I didn’t really think about research. My journey into thinking about research has been through a community engaged lens—as a dimension of any type of work. I really didn’t have that understanding or that framework before. I thought, I do science, and then I do community engagement, and these things are separate, but are they really?