Hello all, I would like feedback on my personal statement for an MPH program. It has a 500-word limit, and sadly, I am at 745...
Here is the prompt: What interests you in the field of public health? What interests you in a specific degree program and department at the Mailman School and what interests you in a particular certificate (if applicable)? Please also describe how you hope to use your public health training to help you achieve your career goals.
Thank you so much.
"He's gone," my mother told my father as she got off the phone with a relative in Vietnam. For the next several months, my parents grieved over my father's friend's death. This was not new to them, since they have gone through deaths from hepatitis B complications before. In rural Vietnam, there is little access to proper healthcare and vaccines. In addition, Vietnamese health beliefs said that the complications result from severe humoral imbalances and bad karma. Because these deaths were in Vietnam, I found myself in a complex position. I comforted my parents, but I was frustrated that I could not do much more.
As the oldest child and first to learn English in my family, I became a bridge between two medical worlds. Ever since I was young, I often accompanied my parents to their doctors' appointments to translate and later on, mediate their misunderstandings about health, which are crucial for our family's health outcomes. However, not many have this type of help, especially if one is arriving in a new country. Despite healthcare being more accessible here, misunderstandings still occur without the bridging of different health beliefs. Fortunately, the Gates Millennium Scholarship helped me strengthen my role as a bridge through my college education. In a medical anthropology course, I read of Vietnamese refugees who believed preventative tuberculosis medications caused a humoral imbalance, creating noncompliance. This raised my awareness of health literacy as a barrier to adequate healthcare. I learned how to better bridge my parents' health beliefs to Western beliefs by considering their views to find a middle ground, rather than dismissing them and comparing them to dominant health beliefs. This then solidified my goals of pursuing public health. I aim to bring to light diverse understandings of health and medicine by applying social aspects of health to quantitative work. I particularly aim to work with immigrant and refugee populations-- groups my parents identify with-- to reduce health disparities in preventable infectious diseases. My first step to achieving this goal is to connect my previous coursework and experiences to my public health goals.
My undergraduate coursework in biology, anthropology, and global health studies connected my understandings of public health. With this variety of coursework and my experiences, I saw how public health is interdisciplinary. I demonstrated how using bioinformatics to estimate evolution rates for human papillomavirus is useful in epidemiology. I illustrated how a lack of knowledge on diarrheal pathogen viability warrants more structured research. I witnessed how ethics play a vital role in research and interventions in developing countries when I piloted a study on cloth filtration in The Gambia. These experiences led me to think critically about how we study infectious diseases and the ethical and cultural boundaries in public health interventions and research.
Mailman's MPH in the Sociomedical Sciences program would prepare me for a career in social epidemiology of preventable infectious diseases because of its unique focus on the social, historical, and ethical aspects of public health. SMS courses of interest to me are Coercion and Persuasion in Public Health and Introduction to Medical Anthropology, since they build onto my research experiences and knowledge from my undergraduate courses. Supplementing this degree with a Certificate in Infectious Disease Epidemiology would supply me with skills needed to incorporate SMS training into epidemiology. IDE courses I would like to take include Emerging Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases. In addition, Mailman's highly interdisciplinary core curriculum would allow me to learn from a variety of fields as well as develop a better sense of analyzing different types of data through the courses Qualitative and Quantitative Foundations. With my experience at a local health departments operate through my work with vaccination records and quality and health improvement plans, I can apply such skills to a practicum or internship at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. My time at Mailman will seamlessly connect my experiences and goals to utilize interdisciplinary approaches to understand how social determinants impact infectious disease outcomes, especially in low-income and marginalized communities of refugees and immigrants.
The SMS program will help me continue to be the bridge for these communities by providing me the training for investigating fundamental causes of health disparities and incorporating these findings to a population level. As a student, I can bring knowledge from working in a county public health department, my comprehensive fields of study, conducting and piloting different types of research, and my personal experiences to this highly interdisciplinary program.
Here is the prompt: What interests you in the field of public health? What interests you in a specific degree program and department at the Mailman School and what interests you in a particular certificate (if applicable)? Please also describe how you hope to use your public health training to help you achieve your career goals.
Thank you so much.
public health studies
"He's gone," my mother told my father as she got off the phone with a relative in Vietnam. For the next several months, my parents grieved over my father's friend's death. This was not new to them, since they have gone through deaths from hepatitis B complications before. In rural Vietnam, there is little access to proper healthcare and vaccines. In addition, Vietnamese health beliefs said that the complications result from severe humoral imbalances and bad karma. Because these deaths were in Vietnam, I found myself in a complex position. I comforted my parents, but I was frustrated that I could not do much more.
As the oldest child and first to learn English in my family, I became a bridge between two medical worlds. Ever since I was young, I often accompanied my parents to their doctors' appointments to translate and later on, mediate their misunderstandings about health, which are crucial for our family's health outcomes. However, not many have this type of help, especially if one is arriving in a new country. Despite healthcare being more accessible here, misunderstandings still occur without the bridging of different health beliefs. Fortunately, the Gates Millennium Scholarship helped me strengthen my role as a bridge through my college education. In a medical anthropology course, I read of Vietnamese refugees who believed preventative tuberculosis medications caused a humoral imbalance, creating noncompliance. This raised my awareness of health literacy as a barrier to adequate healthcare. I learned how to better bridge my parents' health beliefs to Western beliefs by considering their views to find a middle ground, rather than dismissing them and comparing them to dominant health beliefs. This then solidified my goals of pursuing public health. I aim to bring to light diverse understandings of health and medicine by applying social aspects of health to quantitative work. I particularly aim to work with immigrant and refugee populations-- groups my parents identify with-- to reduce health disparities in preventable infectious diseases. My first step to achieving this goal is to connect my previous coursework and experiences to my public health goals.
My undergraduate coursework in biology, anthropology, and global health studies connected my understandings of public health. With this variety of coursework and my experiences, I saw how public health is interdisciplinary. I demonstrated how using bioinformatics to estimate evolution rates for human papillomavirus is useful in epidemiology. I illustrated how a lack of knowledge on diarrheal pathogen viability warrants more structured research. I witnessed how ethics play a vital role in research and interventions in developing countries when I piloted a study on cloth filtration in The Gambia. These experiences led me to think critically about how we study infectious diseases and the ethical and cultural boundaries in public health interventions and research.
Mailman's MPH in the Sociomedical Sciences program would prepare me for a career in social epidemiology of preventable infectious diseases because of its unique focus on the social, historical, and ethical aspects of public health. SMS courses of interest to me are Coercion and Persuasion in Public Health and Introduction to Medical Anthropology, since they build onto my research experiences and knowledge from my undergraduate courses. Supplementing this degree with a Certificate in Infectious Disease Epidemiology would supply me with skills needed to incorporate SMS training into epidemiology. IDE courses I would like to take include Emerging Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases. In addition, Mailman's highly interdisciplinary core curriculum would allow me to learn from a variety of fields as well as develop a better sense of analyzing different types of data through the courses Qualitative and Quantitative Foundations. With my experience at a local health departments operate through my work with vaccination records and quality and health improvement plans, I can apply such skills to a practicum or internship at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. My time at Mailman will seamlessly connect my experiences and goals to utilize interdisciplinary approaches to understand how social determinants impact infectious disease outcomes, especially in low-income and marginalized communities of refugees and immigrants.
The SMS program will help me continue to be the bridge for these communities by providing me the training for investigating fundamental causes of health disparities and incorporating these findings to a population level. As a student, I can bring knowledge from working in a county public health department, my comprehensive fields of study, conducting and piloting different types of research, and my personal experiences to this highly interdisciplinary program.