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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]International health is different than international development. I am not saying they have not been impacted, but I would not discourage a young person from entering that field.[/quote]

I would absolutely discourage any young person from getting an (expensive) degree with the intention of getting a job in the public or nonprofit sector. International health is a fine goal, but the way to go about it is to get some hard skills in actual healthcare (MD, RN) or a related field (engineering, construction, logistics) and then use that to get internships and experience in international settings. Sorry but the world does not need more MPHs or SAIS grads. [/quote]

I was impacted by the destruction of USAID, and most of my colleagues are still unemployed. The ones who weren’t in the DMV are landing best, as their local markets aren’t flooded with former Feds and development workers. They have mostly ended up with interesting jobs in state or county public health departments, associations, or disease-specific research and advocacy groups.

But I’d like to address the perception that an MPH is soft or useless. Do you want people who understand data and epidemiology to make policy and develop strategy for your city/county/state? Do you want someone who actually has studied human behavior and its drivers to guide communication and support for rational GLP1 rollouts? If so, you want people with MPHs. Physicians and nurses often make really poor strategists - they need to be retrained out of thinking at the individual level in order to think at the population level. It can be more direct and effective to train people for the skills you want - that’s what an MPH can do.

That said, I wouldn’t go get an MPH right now. The market is flooded with folks like me with a gazillion years of experience, and we’ll be monopolizing the available jobs, even entry level ones, for another 5-10 years. I hope I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t encourage a young person to take that risk.[/quote]

NP, and definitely not ok with the destruction of usaid. But the MPH is not a degree where I'd trust graduates with data. Limited math prerequisites, programs with no GRE requirements. In general, the stats is superficial and so is the programming, and it has to be if you're not filtering on math ability or experience. It's "run a regression" type stats, unless you are doing a specific concentration that's more quantitative. [/quote]

Right, you don’t hire an MPH as a researcher. Maybe to help clean data and do the scut work of data analysis, but you don’t hire them to design studies, instruments, or set up the analysis.

However, you hire them to take the results of the study and envision what to do with it. What does it MEAN? My researchers could all tell me in great detail about the results of a study, but could not necessarily envision the best behavior change intervention, or policy changes and how to achieve them. PhDs are all about the trees, and MPH are about the forest. Sure, there are people that can do both. But the MPH-trained program manager, strategist, or leader has their place, too.[/quote]

lol to do things like make up the 6-ft rule and keep schools closed during COVID? No thanks. [/quote]

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