I have an overall GPA of 3.64 and I double majored in Public Health and Public Policy from an all-women’s college. I am currently going to do a service year with Americorps as a Health Fellow. I will be facilitating a lot of health education classes (diabetes, nutrition, hypertension), one-on-one health coaching, and care coordination. I also did an internship at Stanford this summer where I helped co-author on an academic paper about chronic liver disease. I did other internships during undergrad that were mainly focused on community health.
I plan to apply to UC Berkeley, UCLA, Boston University, University of South Florida, University of San Francisco, and San Diego State University. The concentration/tracks I am interested in are either Community Health/Social Behavior or the Epidemiology track.
I have not taken the GRE yet but I suspect my math score won’t be so great, which could limit my chances of doing the Epidemiology track. I also don’t have a lot of research experience besides what I did this summer.
Do y’all think I have a good chance of being accepted into some of the aforementioned schools next Fall?
You are a relatively competitive candidate, particularly for community health/social behavior. Some candidates will have more work experience than you - it’s common for MPH candidates to take at least two years off between college and grad school, because if you only take one year off you are applying to MPH programs at best only about 5-6 months into whatever you decided to do after college. But it’s not uncommon for students to also go straight from undergrad, or after only one year.
Epidemiology might be a harder sell. It depends on your math background - a lot of epi programs require or expect some solid math chops (sometimes 2 semesters of calculus; usually statistics; sometimes other math). If your math score isn’t good and you don’t have a strong track record of math classes, that might make epi harder to get into. It depends on the emphasis of the program.
Thanks for the feedback Juillet! I have a lot to think about in regards to wether I should work harder somehow to improve my math/stats skills for Epidemiology (which has always been a struggle for me) or wether I should choose the Community Health/Social Behavior track, which I am also passionate about and where I don’t really have to deal so much with quantitative skills.
I think it depends a lot on what you want to do. In my experience, my friends who had degrees in epidemiology found jobs faster and got paid more on average to begin with. My friends who studied community health/social behavior took a little longer sometimes, and often did lower-paid work right away, but they genuinely enjoyed the work and moved up over time.
At this point, though, there don’t seem to be many significant differences between them (I got a PhD, so my friends in the MPH program mostly graduated between 2010 and 2012 - so they’re about 7-9 years out from finishing now, mid-career.)