Good Schools for Public Health

Graduate School
1

<p>I am a sociology major with some nursing classes and lots of science classes. I was wanting to go into Public Health but was worried about how well I compared to those who I may be applying with. </p>

<p>GRE: 154-V 154-Q
GPA: 3.14
Strong recommenders- 2 in sociology 1 from a professor who taught me research methods</p>

<p>One thing that I am worried about is if public health admissions relies on work history. If so I have only done volunteer work but mostly in nursing homes. With my GRE and GPA would I be competitive? Or what should I do to be more competitive?</p>

<p>Also what would be a good school for public health? I'm more interested in public health policy or in epidemiology.</p>

2

<p>Hi, public heath is my field.</p>

<p>It appears that your GRE scores are above average - around the 60th percentile. I think that’s fine for MPH programs. If your interest is PhD programs, you may want to retake and aim for the 80th percentile in each area, but the scores aren’t bad by any means.</p>

<p>Your GPA is a bit low even for an MPH. For most students with work experience, your discussion of meaningful work experiences and how they drew you into public health - as well as how you learned more about the field and decided you were ready - make the GPA almost irrelevant, but without work experience your GPA becomes more salient. I’m not saying that it will keep you out of anywhere, as MPH programs are professional programs and so don’t require astronomical GPAs like an academic program would. I’m just saying that it’s really going to depend on your other kind of experiences and your statement of purpose and recommendation letters to make up the ground in your GPA.</p>

<p>Is there any particular reason why you don’t want to work for 2-5 years before pursuing an MPH? I go to a SPH (Columbia) and most students here have had work experience before returning to school. Much like any other professional program, the MPH is designed to build upon professional work experience; your education is enriched if you have experiential education from some related position in the past. Otherwise, a lot of the cases and knowledge becomes very abstract. Also, people typically want to hire people with experience; an MPH with no experience isn’t necessarily appealing. My SPH even requires at least 2 years of work experience for most of our MPH roles.</p>

<p>There are many good schools and programs of public health, and almost every single one of them has a concentration in both public health policy and in epidemiology as those are both core areas of public health. The CEPH website has a search engine:</p>

<p>[Search</a> for a Degree Program | Council on Education for Public Health](<a href=“http://ceph.org/accredited/search/]Search”>http://ceph.org/accredited/search/)</p>

<p>Some of the top SPHs are Johns Hopkins, UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard, Michigan, Columbia, Emory, Minnesota, University of Washington, Berkeley, UCLA, Boston U, Pittsburgh, Tulane, Yale, GWU, Drexel, and South Carolina.</p>

<p>Which ones are “good” for you depends on you. One thing I do advise my students is to be cognizant of costs. Like MBA programs, MPH programs at the top private schools have a two-year CoA of that exceeds $100,0000; unlike MBA programs, MPH graduates - even in epidemiology - don’t tend to make that much money out of grad school. So I recommend that they also explore their home state’s public university’s MPH program. I also recommend that they explore the possibility of establishing residency in a state that has a great public SPH in which they are interested attending and working there for a few years to keep costs lower. This is easier in grad school than it was in undergrad.</p>

3

<p>The three schools I’m focused on are University southern Florida, east Carolina, and Georgia st. I was discussing with my department head and public health got brought up and she agreed it was a fantastic fit. My GPA for my field is a 3.5 and the decline in GPA comes from my sophomore year dealing with gravely ill family and having to split time between studying and at hospital.
If I have written a paper that was not published but shows that I do have a strong writing and research ability, would that be helpful? For a class I wrote a 16 page paper about child abuse and correlation to development of eating disorders.</p>