Each semester at UAA, students from various colleges and majors collaborate with professors to help them achieve success with community engagement projects. Community Engaged Student Assistants, also known as CESA students, play a vital role in conducting research and connecting UAA to the greater Alaska community.

The CESA program, hosted each fall and spring through UAA's Center for Community Engagement and Learning (CCEL), offers professors with much-needed help on specific community projects and provides students with a hands-on learning experience to apply what they've learned in the classroom to real life.

Students in the program attend CESA meetings over the course of the semester, presenting their projects, research and findings. As a group they learn about what UAA departments and professors are working on and how their work can impact the community in Anchorage and Alaska to make positive change.

Kaitlan Head, a third-year health sciences major with a focus in speech and language pathology, teamed up this fall with Travis Hedwig, an assistant professor of health sciences in the Department of Health Sciences, whose project involves interviewing adults diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) who have and don't have case management representation.

Kaitlan said she's had an interest in FASD, but that her focus had been more on children in pre-K-12, and that after taking Global Health with Travis last spring, his class broadened her scope of study on this topic.

"As a speech and language pathologist major, I was more focused on the intervention and therapy side," said Kaitlan. "Travis opened my eyes to see that once children are out of the school system-then what?"

She said that through her work and research as a CESA student, she's found that many people aren't diagnosed with FASD early on, unlike other disorders, like autism, which is often diagnosed before kindergarten or early elementary school. Even then — when people are diagnosed — access to resources can be difficult.

"There are a lot of people who are being diagnosed later in life and then trying to grapple with how to use the services that are available to them," Kaitlan said. "It kind of breaks your heart when you realize that someone with this diagnosis could have had services their whole life and they struggled."

Kaitlan said this is why Travis's project is so important, evaluating FASD case management services and how people with case managers have a higher chance of success versus those without.

"We're trying to see the difference between when people have case management-that case management is crucial for an individual who has FASD," said Kaitlan. "That's been the most important part-making the case for it."

Kaitlan has enjoyed working on her CESA project so much that she's continuing her work with Travis into the spring semester. Before her professor asked her to join the project, she had never heard of CESA, but she's glad she took the opportunity and encourages other students to get involved.

"It's just been interesting to see how much you can engage with the community through so many different majors," she said. "I think anyone who has a professor working on a project should try and get involved."

 

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This story originally appeared in the UAA Green and Gold News.

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