Point of View

Intro: [music] Welcome back to The Daily Utah Chronicle’s opinion podcast. I’m your host, Estella Weeks, and you’re listening to Point of View.Steven Carlson: My name is Steven Carlson. I am a clinical psychology PhD student here at the University of Utah, and I am in the health psychology specialization, which means that my research, or my clinical work, focuses on the behavioral and biological processes that might undermine sleep health, as well as other kinds of medical issues. And so my research right now for my dissertation focuses on the role of bedtime procrastination, on circadian rhythms and Cardiometabolic Health, but really I am interested in all things sleep, and I'm really happy to be here. Estella Weeks: Thank you. Okay, why don't we start with the basics? What is sleep like what does your body do during that time. What is your mind doing, and why do we need it? And like, why isn't it even important for us to sleep?Steven Carlson: Sleep is really a unique process in that we often think of it as this kind of inert state where we just black out for, you know, seven or eight hours, nothing really happens, and we just wake up the next day and, you know, get on with our lives. But what we really know about sleep is that it's a really active process, and so we know that there are physiological and neurological processes that happen during sleep that really don't take place at any other time during the day, right? And so sleep is a really important process for us to be able to repair our bodies, prepare our minds for the next day, as well as to do a lot of really important processing of information that we may have learned over the past day, and so it's a really important time during our lives where we are preparing for our days, as well, as you know, repairing damage that we might have done to our to ourselves, to our tissues, to be able to preserve health and well being. It's quite a lot that happens during sleep. And so the question of, you know, what is it for? Why is it important? You know, it's really difficult to find something in our lives that isn't impacted by our sleep. You know, for better or worse.Estella Weeks: So how long should you be getting sleep every single night? And does that have factors of like, age, gender?Steven Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So there, it's a really great question, and it's honestly not a very straightforward answer. So the National Sleep Foundation put together a consensus panel of sleep experts to try to determine what is the quote, unquote, correct amount of sleep. And so the experts came together in a panel to discuss, you know, what factors might influence recommendations for sleep duration. And what they concluded is that predominantly, age plays a really significant role in the recommendations that we might make for sleep duration. And that makes sense, right? We kind of have this intuitive sense that children and infants require quite a bit more sleep than adults do, and so their recommendations for adults. You know, through young adulthood and middle adulthood is about seven to nine hours per night. There is some evidence to suggest that older adults do tolerate sleep deprivation better than young young adults and middle aged adults. Do you know they have fewer lapses in attention or difficulties with reaction time or things like that after sleep deprivation than than younger adults do, and so you know it really varies across your...

Intro: [music] Welcome back to The Daily Utah Chronicle’s opinion podcast. I’m your host, Estella Weeks, and you’re listening to Point of View.Estella Weeks: So we are here with Cameron Vakilian. Cameron's LinkedIn would describe him as the Director of Advising, Outreach and Experimental learning for the College of Humanities. But I would love to hear how you would describe your position here at the U?Cameron Vakilian: Yeah, actually and so that is my former position. I will say Director of Advising, outreach and experiential learning is what I was doing for the College of Humanities. I haven't really announced this, so it totally and it's not on my LinkedIn or anything. So you are getting me in a complete transition here, but very similar work in that I still work for the College of Humanities as Associate Director for Internships and Career Success. That's my official new title for the College of Humanities, and that is because I now have two jobs. I have, that's my role within College of Humanities, I now also work with U Career Success as a Career Specialist. Estella Weeks: Well, congratulations. That's so exciting. Cameron Vakilian: Career development in general is growing at the University of Utah, we're trying to bring on more coaches. We're trying to really put intentionality around college to career, really connecting to more employment opportunities and relationships with employers. So, so that's why I you see that I have a new role in that way. I've always been doing so much within experiential learning, careers, internships, but now I'm a little bit more focused in which is great.Estella Weeks: That's so exciting. So today we're kind of talking all about internships, and this is a big part of your new role. And so would you mind explaining to us just what is an internship? Cameron Vakilian: The simplest way I can describe an internship is an experience that you take on to help you gain more skills into a field you want to go into, or just you want to learn more about some form of work. So I describe an internship as a way that you can immerse yourself in an experience, whether that's good or bad, you're learning more about yourself and you're gaining professional skills. So with that, I will say what an internship is not an internship is not a job that has no defined end date, right? Because a job is where you should already be having those skills. The employers hired you to be fully a part of their team, right? And then they're still training with jobs. And of course, there's onboarding and stuff. But an internship, the reason why we call it an internship is because you are gaining experiences, you're learning new things, and that you should have a supervisor or mentor that's guiding you through that process. Usually, you're a student, but you don't always have to be a student to do an internship, but it's that exploratory experience, whether that's good or bad. We hope it's always good and it turns into something where you're like, yeah, I want to learn more about this, or I'm now going to transition this into full time work. But yeah, in general, an internship should always be an experience catered to your career goals and skill development. Estella Weeks: Got it, and I know for my major specifically, there is an internship requirement. Do you know if that there's an internship requirement school wide? Cameron Vakilian: There is not. That's a good question you bring that up because I think more conversations are going on about that. About should an internship be required because they are so valuable for actually gaining employment out there. But it is not required in a lot of...

What services do you have access to as a University of Utah Student? Well I can guarantee your probably not using them. Join host Estella Weeks and her Student Success Coach Stephanie Santarosa, as they talk about why you need to take full advantage of university resources and how to do so.

Intro: [music] Welcome back to The Daily Utah Chronicle's opinion podcast. I'm your host, Estella Weeks, and you're listening to Point of View.Estella Weeks: E-cigarette usage among college students is on the rise. About 24% of students use them, but we can assume that number is much, much higher. The tobacco consumption boom between the 1920s and 1960s has left that generation with severe health concerns. I'm here with Dr Ryan, a cardiologist with the University of Utah Health, and my question for you, Dr Ryan, is history repeating itself, and is vaping the new cigarettes?Dr. Ryan: I think the concern that we all have is that vaping might lead to the new cigarettes. Vaping, in and of itself, has some consequences. But when you talk about cigarettes, obviously you're talking about in particular things like emphysema and chronic obstructive lung disease or COPD, and then obviously lung cancer in particular. And those, the risks of those really are massively increased by cigarette smoking. But the concern, in particular, with vaping is not necessarily well, part of it is damage associated with vaping, but the other part of it, as I said, is that it may lead to cigarette consumption, to cigarette use. And what's important is that there is no safe level of nicotine use. There is also no necessity for nicotine use. So people, for example, may challenge. They'll say, 'Oh well, you know, [a] can of Coke is more, you know, or drinking lots of Coke is more, Coca Cola is much more, you know, damaging to your health, than vaping' something along those lines. But that might be true if you're drinking 20 cans of Coke for you and for you know, college students, you can absolutely have a can of Coke, it's going to be just fine, but you should not vape. Things will not be just fine from vaping, or in reality, also, I mean nicotine supplements. So I'll see, Zin in particular is popular right now, and kind of other kind of, you know, I will just say, trendy ways of consuming nicotine. The issue in particular is that at some stage that people, what we know from the science is that people will evolve from using nicotine supplements, such as in or or vaping, and then advance onto cigarette smoking to frank cigarette smoking. The other concern that people have is that it may not actually, it has not been shown at all, or at least convincingly, that using vaping instead of smoking, so one of the arguments being, is that, well, 'my uncle used to smoke, he got lung disease, now he vapes, and now he's going to do much, much better.' There's no real convincing evidence to show that that decreases the risk of people going back to smoking, because again, this is not kind of done under medical monitoring. It's not done under the supervision of you know physicians or nurses, etc, or counselors or psychologists or something along those lines. It's independently done as vaping. The question about independently and for for your your colleagues who will say, Oh, well, I'm never going to smoke, first of all, all of us say we're never going to smoke. And but for your colleagues who say, I'm never going to smoke, the vaping, in and of itself, does have health consequences. So when you do use the nicotine, and this is why I said earlier on Estella that there is no safe or beneficial level of nicotine consumption, because nicotine, in...

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