Saturday, May 24, 2014
By jeanne starmack
brookfield
Like many college freshmen, Alex Evans wasn’t sure what he wanted to pursue during his four years in school.
“When I started at Kent State, I was a biology-chemistry major,” the 22-year-old Hubbard High School graduate said Thursday at his home on Hubbard Thomas Road.
“I wanted to be a pharmacist.”
That changed in his sophomore year.
“I switched to biology and wanted to be a doctor.”
Between his sophomore and junior years, the plan changed again.
He started taking business and public health classes as minors, then realized his interest was strongest in public health and epidemiology, the study of how diseases are spread among populations.
He even had the chance to travel to Geneva, Switzerland, last May for the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organization’s annual forum.
“I was looking at, how do you keep the whole country safe?” he said, as he recalled how the map toward a career unfolded for him and he collected not one, but three undergrad degrees along the route.
Evans graduated from the Kent State University main campus May 10 with a bachelor of public health, a bachelor of science in biology and a bachelor of business management — “You have to look at the business end and the biology end” of public health, he explained.
The business end? Take the cost-benefit analysis of preventing or controlling a disease, he pointed out: Vaccinating the entire country might not be the most cost-effective way to do it.
Evans is by no means finished with his academic career.
He will begin this fall at Kent State in the MBA program, working also toward a certificate in health-care facilities with the university’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design.
In the fall of 2015, he’ll begin working toward a master’s in public health at Emory University in Atlanta.
Evans attributes his drive toward academic achievement to his family.
His grandfather, Erwin Mark Evans, was an accounting professor at Youngstown State University.
“I never got to meet him, but the emphasis on education in our family comes from him,” he said.
He also said his parents, Mark and Debby, “expected nothing but my best effort.”
Evans is a member of Kent State University’s Honors College, serving as a student representative to the Honors College Policy Council. He has served as president of Habitat for Humanity, Kent State Chapter, and as treasurer of the Kent State University Student Ambassadors. He also volunteered as a tutor and mentor to other students.