Imposter syndrome. It is a common affliction among public health professionals, but especially those, like us, who are just starting out. At some point of finding our feet in the new profession, we look down to discover that they’ve been swallowed up in shoes that seem far too big. This was how we felt when we read the names and proposals of our fellow This Is Public Health grant awardees. As the only student-led project on the list, we felt the responsibility of representing both our alma mater, The University of Sheffield, and all of the public health students and recent graduates across Europe.

And yet, there was also great excitement. To use the same metaphor, we all came down with an outbreak of itchy feet (OK, that sounds a bit gross). We were eager to know where our project might take us. Even though we already had a pilot season under our belts, there was no way that we would pass up the opportunity to make our Talk Public Health podcast bigger and better, now with the support of ASPHER.

To our friends and colleagues, October may have seemed uncharacteristically quiet on the podcast news front from all three of us. But we assure you that this is a sign of some subterranean brewing and bubbling, ready for the big eruption in November. We’ve had sleepless nights all month. We’ve had online meetings at all hours, coordinating our ideas mainly from the Bahamas, Portugal and the Gambia, among many other locations. Even just with something like choosing the episode topics for the season, we’ve ranked and debated and voted and discussed some more. We think our list is pretty good now, and can’t wait for you to hear what we have in store.

We’re not so cruel to keep you guessing, either. We can tell you about some exciting new developments that you can expect to see. For example, did you know that we’ve decided to couple our podcast with a research project?! That’s right. It’s now not just a student-led podcast, but a student-led podcast WITH a parallel student-led research study. This month, we’ve managed to write our proposal and prepare all of the supplementary documents, and we have already passed the project through the ethics committee. Our study is called PHLOPS, which stands for Public Health Learning On Podcasts and Social media. It’s all about YOU, our dear future listeners (yes you, surely you can’t read this blog post and not be curious enough to listen to the podcast)! You’ll be invited to participate in due time. Please keep an eye out for the online survey link.

And it’s not just our academic muscles getting a workout, either. We’ve also been creative. We are so close to finishing our rebranding project in anticipation of our next season and have been sourcing some items that will make our podcast shine :). Get ready for November, there’s some excitement afoot (and possibly more lame puns)!

- Naomi, Charles and Anny (the Talk Public Health team)