I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have somebody who does the work that we talk about on this show often,

some of the work I try to do in my

personal career in life but we have Denise Smith with us today how are you today?

I'm doing well.

How are you? Good we got this is an interesting conversation because a lot of people who listen to this show, we talk about HBCUs, we talk about the work and the product that they produce often we see that sometimes they find themselves in

rut and so what we're going to do is we're going to fix the problem in the next 20 minutes.

How about that?

Okay, all right.

So the first, my show is unique because in the first, we ask every guest the same first question.

So we start each one of our episodes by having our guest walk us through the art of their career.

And can you walk us through each of your career stops since finishing up in the Berg? I'm sorry, at SCSU. And why have you decided to focus your career work on HPCS?

That's an amazing question.

Thank you for asking that.

It was interesting.

While at South Carolina State, I was a biology major,

I was thinking that I wanted to go to pharmacy school and when I realized that that was not really speaking to my soul I realized I really wanted to do work in the community and health disparities research and so shortly after graduating from South Carolina State I

jumped around the many different jobs. I actually spent some time being a full-time substitute teacher in B for South Carolina where I'm from.

And due to the recession, just found myself going back to grad school and ended up going to Morrill School of Medicine to get my master's in public health policy.

And that is really where I learned and understood the power policy and how policy and thoughtful policy development really changes things and doing work in the Westin and understanding the inequities that a lot of those people in that community are faced with, but doing a lot of work around substance abuse prevention and tobacco prevention, asthma education, I really talking about environmental health issues was really how I kind of got my start after leaving more

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