Alumni Impact: Updates from Mariana & Mariana!
Alumni Impact is a social media campaign that recognizes the excellent work being done by FIUTS alumni all around the world. This week, we have an update on United Women in Health, an organization founded by SUSI 2021 Education and the Future of Work alumni, Mariana Lemes Diamanto and Mariana Manso from Brazil!
See more about their organization in our previous Alumni Impact blog post in October!
“Last year, we founded an organization called United Women in Health (UWH) after SUSI, and during the months of September and October, we organized the first event. See more about this first event here.
Mariana and Mariana conducting an in person interview in Florianópolis,
For this year, we wanted to organize an event to talk about opportunities overseas (outside Brazil) to study and/or work with fellowships. Therefore, we organized a second event called “II Meeting of Women Leaders in the Health Field: Opportunities Overseas”, online and for free. This time, however, we decided to invite women from different academic courses (physiotherapy, law, biology, chemical engineering, for example).
The II Meeting was on April 20th, the second day on April 27th, and the last day occurred on May 3rd.
Since we announced the II Meeting, the U.S. Embassy in Brazil has been talking about it on their social media - they are so kind and thoughtful! We even talked to the Consul General of the United States in Belo Horizonte (a city in Brazil), Mrs. Katherine Ordoñez, and she talked on May 3rd about the bilateral relationships between the Brazil-United States, the opportunities from the Department of State to Brazilian students (like SUSI and Young Ambassadors programs) and so much more.
We obtained over 360 subscriptions to our II Meeting, and our first day (April 20th) obtained over 1000 views on YouTube. We could not be happier with these numbers! Also, our Instagram account, today, has over 550 followers and it’s only getting bigger.
Another amazing fact is that we met in person in a city called Florianópolis in Brazil and we visited companies and medical centers led by women.
Screenshot of a second virtual session of United Women in Health
We are so happy with all the incredible opportunities SUSI has brought to us and we know for sure that there is so much more we can do through our project. We met so many beautiful people and we keep receiving lots of lovely feedback.
Thank you for SUSI and for supporting and believing in us. We miss you and SUSI so much, and we hope to see you in person during the fall.
Our future goals and vision for our project are based on our audience's expectations and feedback. Even though we organized two virtual events - the first one during the months of September and October 2021, and the second one in April and May 2022 - with an incredible amount of subscriptions and views, we realized that the virtual sessions were stronger during the pandemic scenario. Considering that we have been getting out of the COVID situation since the end of 2021, Mariana and I decided that we should focus more on in-person activities and events, but we are still working online, especially because we live far away from each other. We plan on increasing our blog posts by interviewing women that are astonishing in the health field (for example, CEOs of big pharmaceutical companies and students that are pursuing a career outside Brazil), writing texts about the importance of women in leadership positions, and much more.
We still want to share knowledge, for free, with everyone that's following and supporting our organization. We also want to live other in-person experiences so we can create posts for our social media (like pictures and videos). For example, last month, we interviewed two women, in Florianópolis, to talk about their job and we recorded them, so we could post the video on our YouTube account! The video is available on our YouTube channel and we even posted the first minute of it on our Instagram account (see video). We still want to organize a third virtual event, but, for now, the next goals of UWH are to focus on the growth of our social media by creating strong networking.
Interview in Florianópolis.
SUSI programs promote a better understanding of the people, institutions, and culture of the United States among international students, teachers, and scholars. Study of the U.S. Institutes (SUSIs) are short-term academic programs for groups of undergraduate leaders, educators, and scholars from around the world. Hosted by academic institutions throughout the United States, these 5- to 6-week Institutes include an intensive academic residency and an integrated educational study tour. Extracurricular cultural and community activities help to broaden the participants’ understanding of U.S. society. Learn more about SUSI programs here. Our next SUSI for Education and the Future of Work will be here June 18- July 20 2022.
Guest posts on the FIUTS blog represent the experiences and views of individual writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FIUTS or any organizations or institutions affiliated with our programs.