Chances of getting into an Masters in Public Health (MPH) program?

Graduate School
1

Hello everyone! I currently attend Cal State Long Beach. I am looking to apply to MPH programs for Fall 2018 and I am not quite sure of what to expect or if I am competitive enough. I just wanted to get some insight from people who either have knowledge and have applied or those who have got into the program and what their GPA, GRE scores, prior experience, letters of rec, etc were like at the time of applying. I will be applying to UC Berkeley, University of Washington, Brown University, Penn State, and USC for now. Here are my qualifications:

Major: Health Science
GPA: Cumulative- 3.434 Major-3.674 Upper Division Major-3.8

GRE scores: Have not yet taken (estimation: verbal:150 quantitative:155 written:4

Prior experience:

NIH BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity at CSULB): 1 1/2 years of being in a research lab on campus focusing on sleeping patterns and eating habits of children living in my community. Main tasks include: going out to speak to parents of participants, completing all study tasks, collecting data, entering it, coding, and analyzing through different software programs (mostly SPSS)

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA. : I was part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) 2017 cohort in the PHS division analyzing quantitative data from an intervention study focusing on improving quality of life and distress levels among Latina cancer survivors living in rural communities.

I will also be starting an internship with the Bone Marrow Registry next semester, so I am not quite sure if this will be relevant by the time I turn in my applications.

I will be getting letters of rec from both of my PI’s and my professor from Health Promotion and Risk Reduction.

The reason why my cumulitive GPA is so low is because I went through a lot of personal issues during my 2nd year which lowered my GPA a lot. (Went from a 3.5 cumulative 1st year to 3.1 2nd year). However, I bounced back up and got a 3.7 first semester and 4.0 second semester of my 3rd year) which moved it up to a total of 3.4. Will that put a strain on my application, or will it look good that I bounced back with good grades after my bad grades my second year?

Thank you!

2

I think you’re a pretty competitive candidate. My profile looked a lot like yours when applying to MPH programs (this was 10 years ago): middling GPA, higher major GPA (actually almost exactly what yours are), one summer of research and 1.5 years of research experience within a special program to increase diversity in public health research. I got into some competitive MPH programs like Columbia, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Emory.

My GRE scores were higher, though, so I would say try to raise your GRE scores so you can inspire some confidence that you are academically excellent.