Sarah and Emma go to Washington II: Emma's take.

I must echo Sarah's enthusiasm - this was a super event! For me, the excitement was threefold: Firstly, I have always thought that maybe I would enjoy a career as a lobbyist. Mr. Trippler's speech excited me, and got me thinking more about careers in government relations, as well as government relations related to public health issues.
Secondly, occupational health and safety has always been something that is near and dear to my heart: I have a cousin who was permanently disabled in the workplace, as well as two close family members who died in work-related accidents. When I was an undergraduate, I studied workplace safety from a theoretical perspective in my labor economics classes, and if any of you want to see a graphical analysis of risk in the workplace, I am your man! On top of this, in my honors research paper, I looked at the risks shouldered by fashion models when they decide to engage in dangerous eating behaviors to get ahead in the job market. This is definitely not the type of issue that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of workplace safety, I know, but it does fit under the occupational health and safety rubric.
Thirdly, as Sarah said, Mr. Trippler talked about what actions were being taken by individual states, and the fact that the Federal government is lagging behind in some occupational health and safety areas. From a public policy standpoint, this is one of the advantages of living in a country with several separate state-level governments (note for readers: my nerdiness might start to show in the next couple of sentences). During my undergrad, I took a number of public finance courses in which I learned all sorts of fascinating things, including the idea of states (provinces in my case) as essentially policy laboratories. The small size of states (relative to the country as a whole) means that it is relatively less costly to implement programs at the state level. If they work, the federal government can take this into account when looking at the feasibility of implementing similar programs for the country as a whole. Thus, states can be thought of as experimental environments for different policies, which is even cooler if different states implement different sorts of policies to address similar issues. It may be the case that the Federal government has not acted on some occupational health and safety issues for totally unrelated reasons (such as organizational problems in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration offices), but I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss something I believe is cool about public policy in federations.
I think that the main thing I took away from this evening (aside from the excitement of re-living my days as an undergraduate econ nerd) was the breadth of the public health field and the number of opportunities therein. Before a month ago, I had never even heard of the field of industrial hygiene, but the meeting was actually about two things that I identify quite strongly with: safety in the workplace and getting a toe in the policy process to ensure that the concerns of an important group are heard. I definitely encourage all of you to explore relative unknowns lest you let what could be an awesome opportunity slip by!