The Synthesis Requirement Mystery: What CEPH Actually Wants

Your practicum documentation needs to show synthesis. Your integrative learning experience requires synthesis. Your final paper should demonstrate synthesis. But what exactly is synthesis, and how do you know when you're doing it versus just summarizing?

This requirement mystifies students because synthesis is genuinely abstract. Unlike concrete skills like data analysis or presentation delivery, synthesis describes a cognitive process that's difficult to observe directly. Yet once you understand what synthesis actually means, recognizing and demonstrating it becomes much clearer.

Defining Synthesis

Synthesis means combining elements to create something new. When you synthesize, you take multiple inputs—information, perspectives, experiences, theories—and integrate them into understanding or products that couldn't exist from any single input alone.

Contrast this with summary, which describes individual elements without integration. A literature review that summarizes what each study found, one by one, isn't synthesis. A literature review that identifies themes across studies, notes contradictions, and develops an integrated understanding of the evidence is synthesis.

The key is integration. Synthesis creates connections. It shows how pieces relate. It produces new insights from combining existing knowledge.

What Synthesis Looks Like in Practice

In public health practice, synthesis appears in many forms. Program planning synthesizes needs assessment data, evidence-based strategies, stakeholder input, and organizational capacity into a coherent intervention design. None of those elements alone produces the program—synthesis integrates them.

Policy analysis synthesizes health data, economic considerations, political feasibility, and community values into recommendations that balance competing factors. The recommendation emerges from synthesis, not from any single input.

Community health improvement synthesizes epidemiological data, social determinants analysis, resource mapping, and priority-setting processes into action plans. Again, integration creates outputs that no individual element could produce.

Notice the pattern: synthesis involves multiple inputs producing integrated outputs. When you demonstrate synthesis, you're showing how you brought disparate elements together to create something unified.

Synthesis in Your Practicum Documentation

To demonstrate synthesis in your competency narratives, explicitly show integration. Don't just describe what you did—explain how you combined different knowledge, skills, and information sources.

Weak documentation lists activities without integration: "I reviewed the literature. I collected survey data. I presented findings to stakeholders." Each sentence describes an isolated action.

Strong documentation shows synthesis: "I integrated findings from community surveys with published prevalence data and stakeholder priorities to develop recommendations that addressed the most significant gaps while remaining feasible within organizational constraints." This demonstrates combining multiple elements into unified outputs.

When writing, use language that signals synthesis: "combined," "integrated," "connected," "balanced," "reconciled," "developed from multiple sources." These words indicate you're not just summarizing—you're creating new understanding from diverse inputs.

The Synthesis Thinking Process

Synthesis requires a particular thinking approach. When working on practicum projects, actively ask yourself integration questions:

How does this new information connect to what I already know? Different data sources might seem disconnected, but synthesis finds the threads linking them.

What patterns emerge across different experiences or sources? Individual observations become more meaningful when you recognize themes across them.

How can I reconcile conflicting information or perspectives? Synthesis often involves navigating tensions, not just collecting agreements.

What new understanding emerges from combining these elements? The "so what" of synthesis is insight that couldn't come from any single source.

Building these questions into your work process makes synthesis more natural. You're training yourself to think integratively rather than just accumulatively.

Common Synthesis Mistakes

Students sometimes claim synthesis when they've actually produced something else. Listing multiple sources without integration isn't synthesis—it's comprehensive collection. Describing your practicum activities chronologically isn't synthesis—it's narrative summary. Stating that something is important because multiple sources say so isn't synthesis—it's aggregated support.

True synthesis creates something new. If you could have reached the same conclusion from any single input, you haven't synthesized. If your output is just a collection of inputs gathered together, you haven't synthesized. Synthesis requires the whole to be more than the sum of its parts.

Developing Synthesis Skills

If synthesis feels challenging, you can develop the skill intentionally. Practice with small exercises: take two articles on the same topic and write a paragraph that integrates their insights rather than summarizing each separately. Take data from two sources and describe what you learn from their combination that neither shows alone.

In your practicum, seek opportunities for integration. When multiple information sources exist, actively look for connections. When multiple stakeholder perspectives emerge, identify themes and tensions. When theory and practice seem disconnected, work to understand how they inform each other.

Synthesis becomes easier with practice. The more you train yourself to think integratively, the more naturally synthesis appears in your work—and the more convincingly you can document it for competency demonstration.