I am interested in getting a MPH as a graduate degree. Though I don’t know what undergrad major I should choose. I see some public health or global health major which sounded good since I want to do internships in my undergrad years , though I was informed those majors are new and half baked at most universities, though many MPH degrees are well supplemented with other majors. Any ideas? I’ve looked at some but it seems like a few majors combined would be helpful. Don’t know which one to choose, maybe a create your own major???
Apply undeclared and see which classes interest you. People get MPHs from a variety of backgrounds ranging from statistics, to psychology, to biology. You might find that you decide to do something completely different than public health or that an MPH is not necessary in the long run.
My brother got his MPH from Harvard; he majored in Anthropology as an undergraduate.
I have a PhD in public health (& social psychology) and I majored in psychology as an undergrad. My classmates majored in a lot of things. Most were social science majors of some kind (psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, history, etc.) Many majored in modern foreign languages and cultures like Spanish or French, and many also majored in the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology. There were a couple of math majors in the biostats and epidemiology departments. I had one classmate who majored in English literature!
So you can major in anything. I will say that many MPH programs will prefer majors in the social sciences and natural sciences, since public health is built upon those fields and it helps to have a foundation in them. But there’s no major that they completely bar from entry or that would get you rejected, so you should choose what you like.
I will say that I disagree about the public health majors. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it is “half-baked.” Many of the schools that have new or newish public health majors at the undergraduate level have had graduate public health programs for years, and so they know what they’re doing when designing an undergraduate curriculum. Some public health majors build upon strengths and competencies that already existed at the college and just created a major from it (i.e., there were already a critical mass of faculty members who taught classes, or could teach classes, related to public health). And even if the program was built from scratch, many years of planning go into the proposal and construction of a new major. It would have to have the support of at least several faculty members who were willing to grow the program.
Would a biology BS in pre-med with a minor in Public Health be good because I found a program at Kent State where most of the basic Public Health course(ex. epidemiology, global health, public health, social and behavioral health, environmental health, biostatistics, and prevention and control of disease) for the major were required for the minor? Or could I even take pre-med if I am planning on an MPH?
Also is Kent State a good program for a BS in pre-med? What is Kent State like? Trying to figure out if it’s a good fit for me.
Your BS wouldn’t be in pre-med; it would be in biology (or something else). Which makes me ask - if you want to get an MPH, why would you be on a pre-med track? Do you want an MD/MPH or just an MPH? Biology with a public health minor is a good choice, particularly if you want to go into the more natural sciences side of public health (epidemiology, environmental health sciences, clinical lab research, etc.)
Anywhere is good for pre-med, as long as they have the classes.
Thanks juillet. The reason I was considering pre-med was because to get into an MPH school you have to take an MCAT or GRE exam so it seemed best to get the pre-med education so I learn everything covered on the exam. I plan to get and MPH not an MD/MPH.
You don’t have to take the MCAT to get into MPH programs. Some MPH programs do accept the MCAT because many applicants are MDs or students who want to go to med school and have already taken the MCAT, and they’re trying to make it easy for those students to apply. But the standard exam for entry into an MPH program is the GRE. And the GRE doesn’t cover pre-med topics - it only has a verbal reasoning section, a quantitative reasoning section, and an analytical writing section. It’s quite similar to the SAT in that regard, and you certainly don’t need to take pre-med classes in order to do well. I took a single biology class in college and no chemistry, no physics, etc.
How many GRE subject tests did you have to take?
I didn’t take any. There’s no GRE subject test in public health, and any other one would be useless for MPH programs. You’ll only have to take the GRE.
What is covered on the GRE?
The GRE is like the SAT on steroids. You can read about the test here: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/. Basically, there are three sections: verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing.
For verbal, you do reading comprehension questions exactly like the SAT; the only difference is that the vocabulary and the passages are more advanced. There are two other question types - sentence equivalence (similar to sentence completion, except that you select two answer choices that mean the same thing) and text completion (you are given a passage with 1-3 blanks, and you have to choose the words or phrases that will fill in the blanks and make the passage make sense).
The Quant section is almost exactly like the quant section from the SAT - there are quant comparison questions and regular multiple choice questions. There are also “numeric entry” questions where you have to fill in the blank with no choices to choose from (free response). The math covered goes up to I would say about 10th grade math - mostly arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, with a few “data analysis” questions (basic statistics like mean, median, mode; reading charts and graphs; basic probability). There will be nothing on the test that you didn’t learn in high school unless your teacher didn’t cover basic prob in algebra.
The analytical writing section is two essays. One is an “issues” essay (they give you a prompt and you have to respond to it) and the other is an argumentative essay (they give you a prompt with two sides; you have to choose one and write a persuasive essay). They are both 30 minutes long.
THANK YOU SO MUCH JUILLET
You’re welcome 