College students spend lots of time on their senior capstone projects, but students in the physical therapy program at Quinnipiac University needed so much time to set theirs up that they started when they were juniors.
Senior physical therapy students Annie Dumas, Meaghan Scullin, Julianne Smith, Stephen Valdes and Reilly Zajac organized a free health fair at the Keefe Community Center on Saturday, a culmination of their hard work.
The project began when they originally started doing food drives and pantry drives, as well as programming with the kids that attend daycare at the Keefe Center in previous years.
“The five of us really all had the same idea that we wanted to do something out in the community,” Scullin said. “… We just kind of built it up from there.”
The event featured a handful of different vendors and presentations throughout the day about nutrition and the effects of the physical therapy program.
Patty and George Forte, Hamden residents who attended the event, watched a presentation about fat and said the information was helpful and presented well.
“I really, really liked it,” Patty Forte said. “I liked the visual that (presenter Dianisi Torres) did too, I thought that was really good. And she answered the questions, too… It’s good to relearn things.”
The selection process to decide who would present at the event was the capstone group’s responsibility, and they gathered presenters like Torres, a nutrition outreach educator at the University of Connecticut. Torres gave multiple presentations throughout the day, giving attendees information pertinent to their personal health.
Scullin said the vendors and presenters were glad to participate in something that they had lost since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of them haven’t been able to be out in the community for the last year or so, so they were really excited to be a part of it,” Scullin said.
Amber Jackson ran a booth at the event representing the New Haven Health Department and was handing out information about child transportation safety. She was conducting child car seat checks outside the Keefe Center.
“It’s important because a lot of different people have a lot of different health concerns, so that way we can gear them in the right direction of what they need, and also for them to spread the word,” Jackson said. “If (attendees) can take some information and spread it to someone else, that’s important as a community.”
The capstone group took turns walking around helping attendees and hosting presentations, but otherwise sat at the registration table next to the door. Now that all their hard work had paid off and the event finally happened, they were able to look around and admire the final product of their capstone project.
“We’ve all been so excited,” Scullin said. “It’s kind of been a whirlwind planning it while in full-time school and it came up so quickly, but it looks awesome.”