Undergraduate /
MPH Essay: Choice of degree, program, concentration [2]
MPH grad essay: could someone please review the beginning for me? Thanks!
Prompt: Choice of degree, program, concentration, Reasons for selecting this academic program, Academic and career interests, and Professional and volunteer experiences as they relate to your academic program. Up to 1500 words.
It is impossible to pick up a newspaper in this country and not find an article bringing today's health issues to the foreground. Instead of being relegated to the back pages, health and healthcare issues have had clear ramifications on the current and past administrations. We hear health care reform, AIDS, Bird Flu, Swine flu, cancer and the obesity epidemic almost as often as we hear about Guantanamo, deficits, bailouts, Maddoff and Iraq.
In light of the complexity of the public health issues facing the world today, a thorough understanding of the issues and the ability to integrate different knowledge sets and perspectives is needed to tackle them. Disparities in health in developing nations, increased prevalance of chronic diseases like obesity, and infectious diseases in an increasingly globalized world are problems which necessitate perspectives from different disciplines.
A combination of experiences abroad and here in the US has fostered my interest in researching health disparities. As an undergraduate studying microbiology, immunology and chemistry, I gained scientific experience in different laboratory settings. I became a research assistant to the Director of Biomedical Graduate Studies at the Miller School of Medicine in Miami, researching multiple myeloma and in the process learning lab techniques and cultivating analytical thinking skills. As a junior, I won a scholarship to the Weizmann Institute of Science to travel to Israel and research cell motility and metastasis with Dr. Yosef Yarden. This type of work gave me the valuable experience of not only learning from prominent scientists but also of working in international and culturally diverse settings.
Basic research, studying microbiology and immunology, and volunteering in different clinical settings allowed me to learn about illness and disease on an individual level, but traveling through South America and the Middle East I was exposed to inequalities among populations and glaringly obvious disparities in health outcomes among nations. I quickly grew fascinated with the idea of determining the root causes of health disparities apart from the purely biological. Economics clearly a played a part, but could it be the sole determining factor? Do racial and ethnic factors determine health outcomes among nations? Can cultural differences alone account for behavioral factors that determine health outcomes?
These questions, framed on an international scale, were what I had in mind when I enrolled in Dr. Donna Shalala's health care course on the health care crisis. Her incredible and in-depth knowledge of the issues gained during her years in public policy and her very obvious passion for equality were inspiring, and helped to focus my attention on domestic public health issues I had previously neglected. For example, why did minority groups have greater health problems right here in the US? What factors contribute to the worse health outcomes of racial and ethnic minorities even when similarly insured, and how effective are current efforts to combat this disparity? Questions like these caused me to move away from basic scientific research and gravitate towards health-related research with practical applications.
I have held several positions in the field of public health while attending the University of Miami and just after graduating. Through an internship with the Florida Heart Research Institute I had my first- albeit informal- exposure to epidemiology with a program called Mission to Health, a chronic disease prevention program targeting the high-risk Pan African community of Miami. We performed health screenings to identify members of the community with cardiovascular risk factors and offered fitness, nutrition, and wellness classes to promote lifestyle changes followed by an additional screening program to evaluate the program's effectiveness. With this program, I was able to collect and analyze health data, examine lifestyle factors in their relation to a chronic disease, and encourage the implementation of evidence-based lifestyle changes. Evaluating the screening results and analyzing the data helped us in interpreting the results of the program, but such epidemiological methodology would have been irrelevant if not for the social and behavioral health knowledge of the researchers which allowed us to launch the program and collect such data in the first place. Because we were focused on improving the health of a minority population, it was vital to be able to acknowledge the role of social and community factors like race, ethnicity and culture as factors for their high-risk status for cardiovascular disease. For example, culturally-specific dietary habits and a cultural suspicion of physicians affected the level of participation in the program by this mostly-Haitian community. This first-hand understanding has deepened my desire to study public health beyond the purely biological mechanisms of diseases towards a more interdisciplinary approach, factoring in social and behavioral determinants as well.
After completing a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology & Immunology and Spanish a semester early, I traveled to South America in hopes of gaining more experience the field of public health. In Cochabamba, Bolivia I worked in a public health clinic located in an underserved and mostly Quechua-speaking part of town. In the clinic's laboratory, I drew blood and collected other specimens to test for cholesterol, glucose and hormone levels. Additionally, I participated in a collaborative effort with Spain's Doctors Without Borders and Escudo Epidemiológico, testing for and tracking the occurrence of chagas. When not in the lab, I helped create community educational programs aimed at disseminating health-promoting practices throughout the community, teaching good hygiene techniques and the importance of vaccination as well as encouraging community members to take advantage of the clinic's services. On a weekly basis I traveled throughout the community to collect data for the public health registry by weighing, measuring and obtaining health backgrounds on children.
Each of these experiences has increased my awareness of the complexities that arise and challange advancements in public health. I retain my original questions, constantly amassing more: what mechanisms are in place to ensure that research is properly communicated to public health officials and translated into useful programs and policy? What more can be done? To begin to answer these questions, study design, ethical research guidelines, biostatistical applications and data analysis are knowledge and skills I wish to learn while furthering my education in public health and epidemiology at BLANK University. While one may find similarities among various masters programs in epidemiology, BLANKS's location in BLANK - a hubub of policy and research -and its affiliation with organizations like ___ and ___ mean that this program offers not just an amazing program and CEPH accrediation but also a panoply of internship and professional experiences.
Ending contains a bit more on the specific value of the program and my career goals, totalling 1200 words or so.
