The Campus Forum

A nearly 5-foot-long cigarette, smoke wafting from one end, beckoned passers by to a booth in the Memorial Union Quad last May. Though a canopy and informational materials were set up as well, Alice Atsma says it was the cigarette — “lit” with dry ice — that attracted people to the booth where she waited for them to approach.

Atsma was volunteering with Peer Health Advocates at a tobacco awareness booth that she and other students in the group had created. Having joined the group only a few months prior, this was Atsma’s first PHA event where she would interact with the public, and she was nervous.

“Very nervous,” Atsma says. “I didn’t know what to say or if I could teach them anything.”

As a pre-physical therapy student at Oregon State University, Atsma was always motivated to reach her career goals in health care, but struggled to envision health as a functioning concept outside of textbooks. She had doubts about whether she could really contribute to campus health with brochures, packs of gum and whatever knowledge she’d retained from her health classes.

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