Hi, I’m currently a junior in college and have decided that I want to go to graduate school. What do top MPH programs look for in their applicants? I want my concentration to be either biostatistics or epidemiology. I have about a 3.7 gpa and I’m sure I can score very high on the GRE. How much does GPA and GRE score matter?? I heard MPH programs mainly want work experience in the field. I don’t have any public health work experience, but I did major in it for undergrad. Does that count as experience??
All I know is that your undergraduate coursework does not count as work experience. Search the forum there are previous posts about getting into good MPH programs.
Your best bet is likely to be biostats…
Public health is my field. From information sheets I’ve seen around the 'net, acceptance rates to MPH programs seem to range from about 25-80% depending on the program and the concentration. [url=<a href=“http://depts.washington.edu/sphnet/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/FINAL_ASPH-Annual-Data-Report-2011.pdf%5DHere%5B/url”>http://depts.washington.edu/sphnet/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/FINAL_ASPH-Annual-Data-Report-2011.pdf]Here[/url] is an ASPH report from 2012 with acceptance rates from a bunch of MPH programs that existed at the time. Table 1.10 on page 26 has the data. Berkeley has a 26% acceptance rate and UCLA’s was about 54%. Biostatistics and epidemiology programs overall have about a 50-55% acceptance rate, but that is not broken down by school or degree.
However, I will say that when I got my PhD at Columbia I knew very few MPH students who had 0 work experience after college, even the ones who were in the one program at the time that didn’t require it. Most people had 2-5 years; there were a few people who had just 1 and quite a lot of people who had 5+. Public health work experience means actual full-time work experience post-college. So the fact that you majored in it will not count. Your GPA and GRE score matter a lot, of course. In both biostats and epi, a strong math background will be important too. Different programs have different expectations for that - for example, at Emory, I know that they like their epi MPH students to have at least one semester of calculus and their biostats applicants to have at least two. (Might have changed since then.)
My dd recently was accepted into the UCLA grad program for engineering. Her undergrad GPA didn’t get her in, but her GRE score and company experience (along with the fact that they company is helping to subsidize her education) helped her to gain admission.