Reddit reviews Contemporary Public Health: Principles, Practice, and Policy

Hey, glad to hear you're interested in public health. It sounds like you have a great background and would be an excellent candidate for the MPH (are you in school now? or just thinking about it?). DC is also a great place to be for public health; obviously, a lot of policy is determined there, but there are also a lot of headquarters/non-profits/etc to work with that are heavily involved in public health.

If you're interested in Infectious Disease/Global Health, then the obvious choice for you would be Epidemiology. Where I went to school, they even had a specific program for this called GLEPI (or global epi) and I think it is fairly common at many public health schools. GLEPI is a great area to go into, you'd like it a lot if you enjoyed your time in the Peace corps. If you decide to go with the MPH then you should look into the EIS at some point. I know they can be pretty selective and rarely take people with just their MPH, but it sounds like you would be a good fit for that. What did you work on in the Peace Corps?

I got my MPH in Epidemiology/Infectious Disease about 3 years ago. I work in a non-profit that does active disease surveillance in ATL, GA (basically a contractor for CDC). My job consists of doing medical chart reviews (probably 20%), but a LOT of the rest of my duties involve organizing and entering data. So much so, that we barely have any time to analyze it. I probably spend about 10% of my time actually analyzing and presenting data, but I think this is just unique to my employer, a lot of MPHs I know don't experience this.

One common sentiment I hear from a lot from MPH's is that it is difficult to 'move up the ladder'. Don't get me wrong, you can land a fantastic job earning over 50k a year right out of school, but the MPH can only take you so far. It really depends on where you work too. My observations might be specific to CDC, but if you want to be leadership position, you have to wait around for someone to vacate a position and then be lucky enough to get it (very rare where I am), or go on a get an additional degree (MD, DVM, PhD...). I've sort of been learning that in the hard-science disciplines, your position/placement and status is generally based on your degree, whereas a lot of the soft-sciences base their advancement policies more on merit and experience. Mind you, I have no evidence for this, it's just my personal feeling =).

I feel like I've been focusing on a lot of negatives, so let me talk about some of the good things! My favorite aspect about the degree is its vast applicability. Nearly every problem/current event has a public health aspect. The first thing that comes to mind is Ebola, that's been in the news a lot lately obviously =). Another great thing is the community, public health people are very intelligent, polite and positive attitude people. It's not a cutthroat environment like my friends in Business or Medicine frequently complain to me about. I also think that the field has enormous growth potential. Public health is grossly underfunded in the US, but I don't think it will be like this forever. A great read if you're serious about learning more about the history of public health and it's future is Contemporary Public Health: Principles, Practice, and Policy.

Anyways, I've been talking a lot. Feel free to PM me if you have specific questions or want to talk more!