Students spread awareness for HIV/AIDS

The University of Rhode Island is implementing a new course that seeks to raise awareness and education for HIV/AIDS. Kyrsten Carlson and Carly Amurao are students in the honors seminar class.

“We are reopening the topic of HIV/AIDS because recently it’s been getting swept under the rug in our generation,” Carlson said. “Most of us knew very limited information about HIV and a lot of it was incorrect.”

The class is not like any ordinary class. The professor, Dr. Sara Murphy, does not believe in using PowerPoint slide presentations and centers the class around discussions instead. Because it is a small class with around only 12 people, the students create an open atmosphere and learn from each other.

“I think the best part is we have so many different majors in the course, everyone is bringing their own perspective,” Amuaro said. “I bring my own perspective, the biology majors bring their own views, and we get different kinds of discussion that you wouldn’t get within your own major.”

A main part of the class is centered on activism. The students work on a semester long project to help raise HIV/AIDS awareness on campus. One of the bigger projects in the class is the free HIV/AIDS testing at Health Services.

“One of the scariest things about HIV is our age bracket, 13-24, is the highest group for new incident rates, and 51 percent of people within that group do not know they have it because they aren’t getting tested,” Amurao said.

Amurao and Carlson pointed out that last year only six people showed up to get tested. They hope that the awareness this class is beginning to create will be able to bring in more students.

The class is not meant to stop there. Many of the students can use this information in their own lives. One of which is Carlson, who is a nursing major that hopes to use this class throughout her healthcare career. Another aim in the class is to get students more involved in HIV/AIDS awareness throughout the university.

“We need more flyers, more attention and HIV attention,” Carlson said.

They both feel that the university needs to do a better job to help students understand this serious disease. Some of the ways include HIV/AIDS facts and statistics, making the free HIV testing more comfortable and easily accessible and hosting an event for AIDS Day. They even proposed making it a part of the URI 101 curriculum for incoming freshmen.

“The Gender and Sexuality Center does a great job at providing resources, but they can only do so much,” Amuaro said. “We need the university as whole to get on board with that.”

“That’s what this class is aiming to do,” Carlson said.