By Dana and David Dornsife Dean Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH

As we head into the fall, I find myself thinking of a childhood memory. We visited a seasonal "pumpkin patch" set up to allow people to browse, weigh, and purchase a pumpkin of their choice. For my younger brother and I, the constraint was that we could each pick one, but we had to be able to lift and carry it. We earnestly browsed the options, trying some larger ones but they would not budge from the ground, and settled on smaller ones based on what we could hold.

With my perspective looking back as an adult, I realize that getting the biggest pumpkin I could carry was just something that became interesting only after a constraint was imposed. I wanted to rise to the challenge, to push the limits of what was possible.

This has been on my mind as we look at options and constraints in fall quarter and the year ahead. Many of us find it tempting to pack into our schedules more than we can carry. Even a single meeting can become overloaded with more items for discussion than can be given serious attention. The fall can be a time when we want to pursue multiple goals to the fullest, but perhaps myself and others benefit from taking a fresh look and making honest judgements about what we can realistically carry, and reorienting to the goals that are most important.

Of course, we can carry more when we combine efforts with others. I am particularly grateful this fall for those engaged in our external faculty hiring process across all four departments and other key leadership searches (open positions can be found via our Employment Opportunities page). These recruitment efforts, alongside efforts to warmly welcome and support our colleagues and students through a new academic year, will be crucial to what we can take on.

Together, we have greater capacity for lifting up our school's founding commitment to human rights and social justice and advancing our current mission to improve the health of communities through education, scholarship, and cooperative partnerships. Mission-aligned efforts throughout our school, including those recently attracting media attention, take on meaning through our ability to lighten the loads and inform the choices that are most difficult and consequential for health. These are choices faced by individuals, families, communities, organizations, and across policy realms, playing out in aspects of our daily lives as well as in moments of crisis and transformation. Thanks for all that you do to guide us toward healthful choices given existing constraints, and when needed to generate entirely new options.