Evaluate what? Evaluate THIS.

I think evaluation is often the ugly stepsister that no one thinks about. Kind of like public health. I feel like very few people that I talk to know exactly what public health is.

Only the prevention of disease in millions of people and increased quality of life for even more. No. Big. Deal.

To be honest, though, I didn't know exactly what public health was until I researched it further. I was thinking...I like health, and I like...public things...? Then when I started studying public health, evaluation did not mean that much to me either. Formative, randomized control, impact, process- WHAT? Okay, well now that I'm in my third semester, I really do understand how important evaluating programs is. Money will most likely always be an issue (until I marry my billionaire husband) and being able to figure out what methods are most cost-effective are always going to be important for making the most impact (something I'd like to be able to do). Evaluation of materials is always interesting and never seems to turn out the way you would have thought. Humans are irrational and weird and we think we know ourselves, but it seems like we never really do. An example being our Gardasil campaign- we thought people would be influenced by the fear of putting their partners at risk for HPV. Turns out, this was not true. Sigh. Oh well, I guess at least we know how to effectively market to them.