The Office of Health Education & University Health Services are now recruiting applicants for the Peer Health Education program for Spring 2014! Please read the following for more information about the program and see the applications attached.

The Peer Health Education program is made up of undergraduate students from a wide range of academic backgrounds. The Peers are requested to go around campus to residence halls, classrooms and student organizations to give presentations on different health topics pertaining to college students (ie. stress, alcohol & drug use, nutrition, safer sex, etc). The Peers also participate in a variety of events on campus by the request of other departments or events sponsored by University Health Services (ie. tabling in The Commons for an awareness month).

Aside from the main work that you would do as a Peer Health Educator, this program is also a great opportunity for you to build upon your public speaking skills, enhance your interpersonal communication skills, meet new people from across campus, network with different student organizations and departments, master your team-building skills, add a valuable piece to your resume/CV, and have fun while learning!

Each student in the program will receive 3 upper level credits per semester for being a Peer (you can be in the program for up to 4 semesters in a row) and will be able to register for the class if and when we have accepted you into the program. The credits are given out through the Social Work department. Please note that as an incoming peer you are required to take a once-a-week class where you will be trained on all of the different health topics. The class will be held on Wednesday's from 4:30-7pm in the Spring 2014 semester. You would be dedicating approximately 3-6 hours a week (class included) to this program and each week can vary depending on the amount of events we have. If the class time does not fit your schedule, we encourage you to keep our program in mind for the following year as we try to take new applicants every semester.

If you would like to see an example of projects and events that the Peer Educators put on, stop by one of our upcoming events and introduce yourself so we know who you are :-) You can find a listing of our events on our myUMBC groups page here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/healthed

Interested students should submit their applications no later than Wednesday, Nov. 27th. We will then contact you to set up an interview time and we will take it from there. Final selections will be made by Dec. 11th. Questions can be directed to the Health Education Coordinator, Mickey Arora, at parora@umbc.edu or 410-455-3752.