Sure! Heads up that this is going to be a super long post! Every experience is very different and completely dependent on your host site and what they applied to have you do while you're there. However, there is an overarching set of public health related benchmarks you're supposed to meet during your 2 years for everyone in the program to try to make sure even if the experience isn't the same across the board, hopefully everyone leaves with at least a base knowledge of certain topics. These topics range from the basics of public health sciences, to understanding funding of public health programs, to cultural competency, and all kinds of other things.
In between when you get your offer and when you start your position is just as crazy as the application process. You'll go through fingerprinting at an approved facility near you, several rounds of paperwork for security clearances so you can get your CDC ID (you usually get your ID when you come to Atlanta for your first training so I don't know how that's going to work this year), and a set of online webinar courses that are optional, but highly recommended, that should help you learn to navigate the program and set your expectations for what the next 2 years will look like.
During that time, you'll also be scrambling to find housing in your new location that you can afford. People in more rural areas might have a harder time finding rentals, but have cheaper rent. I live in a rural area and called 20+ rental companies, only had one return my calls, and didn't get to see pictures of where I would be living until the day before I took a week long road trip to get there. In a big city, there's more places to choose from, but many will likely be outside your budget unless you have a significant other who will be living with you and making decent money or you find a roommate.
It also was much harder than I expected organizing packing up your whole life and going through the moving process. I had moved 5+ times in the last 4 years so I figured it wouldn't be that much different, but I was incredibly wrong. All of those moves had been local, and this move was from Florida to Oregon. Due to a lot of factors, I couldn't find a single moving option that would work other than driving my personal car and only taking what fit in it, which isn't much. So after months of denial I donated every piece of furniture I owned to other college kids, left about half my clothes in a closet at my parents' house, and got really good at packing space bags (the ones that you suck all the air out of with a vacuum to minimize the amount of space they take up). My dad took 2 weeks off work and we spent a week taking a Great American Road Trip to get out to Oregon, staying the night with a lot of family along the way, and a week setting up my new apartment and orienting me to my new town.
I chose to move a month before the program started because I'm someone who needs time to adjust to my new space before I'm able to thrive in a new environment. I knew that being thousands of miles from everyone and everything I knew was going to be an adjustment I wouldn't be able to make in a week or 2. So I had my dad there the first week to help me assemble furniture, hang pictures, and explore some of the other towns around here. I spent a lot of time traveling that month since we don't have many big stores in my town. I also took the time to go to local museums, check out the Arts Center and the farmer's market, and generally go out to places where I could try to make friends. Other people moved up to the week before the program started. When people moved seemed to mostly depend on if they were leaving another job behind to come to this one, if they had a significant other or a family moving with them, and how far they were moving.
A quick blurb about my host site since your host site affects everything about your experience. I am assigned to a Tribal health clinic in eastern Oregon. As I said before, it's a very rural area, so our clinic offers a really wide range of services that a lot of other clinics might not since it can be a very long drive to other places that offer specialty care. I work under the umbrella of a Community Health and Wellness program and was originally assigned mainly to Community Health Assessment (CHA) and Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) related work. That has changed a lot due to the pandemic and a major flood, but we'll get to that in a minute. From the descriptions you gave above, I would say my work has been more along the lines of a sink or swim position out of those options, but that's a sort of work style I'm familiar with and tend to excel in so I haven't really minded.
The first week of the program was a whirlwind. My host site was in the middle of a huge month long Harry Potter themed event to celebrate Halloween, so on my first day when the IT department couldn't get my computer log on to work they sent me to a Harry Potter trivia game as a way to meet other people who work in the clinic. I love Harry Potter and it worked fabulously because I won the game by a landslide and then spent the month being referred to as "that Harry Potter girl" instead of "the new girl" when people didn't know my name
. I am so grateful that the events they held that month fostered the sort of environment that made it easy to meet people and get to know them in a casual way since I'm not always great at getting to know new people. The rest of my first week was spent meeting people and doing trainings. I got to tour my host site, go through their new hire training program, and took a lot of CDC's trainings for our first month of the program. It will probably take a while for your host site to get everything set up for you. People in my cohort had problems with their host site log ins, getting general office equipment ordered and/or set up, etc. and it's to be expected, especially if you are the first associate they've been assigned. Your goals for your first week should be less about the work you'll be doing and more about adjusting to your new workplace and learning the culture there. Recognizing who other people go to when they're having problems, learning names, and things like that are going to be invaluable later in your program.
Three months into my program was January 2020. By that point I was deeply involved in a lot of work at my host site. We were full steam ahead planning for the Community Health Assessment I was there to help run. I had started writing our first draft with input here and there from my host site supervisor. I was working with our Behavioral Health team to run our Warming Station for people experiencing homelessness on the Reservation. We were about to have our Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) site visit so we had a mock site visit to prepare for that. The whole Community Health and Wellness department was working on a variety of health promotion programs. Three months in I felt very well oriented to the community and the work both my department and the clinic as a whole was doing. I finally had people remembering I was there and coming to me for help on projects I had expressed an interest in and things like that, which felt awesome after months of working very hard to earn the respect of my new colleagues. I also by that point had been watching what would later be named COVID-19 very carefully and even though it hadn't yet fallen on most of my co-workers radars being aware of that would become important later on.
Instead of jumping all the way to today, I'm going to give a bit more of a timeline overview of what happened between February and now. In February, we had our PHAB site visit, which went really well! Then, a week later, we had a major flood for the first time in roughly 50+ years. Since everyone from our partner entities who would have been needed for input on the CHA was working flood response, I got assigned to flood response. Early on in the program I had expressed interest in emergency management related activities and mentioned my experience working in volunteer disaster response, so my host site supervisor really let me run with this one. I did everything from helping set up our Warming Station as an evacuation shelter on the night of the flood, to helping run our flood resource center for the public, to organizing flood clean up kits to distribute. Those flood clean up kits included N95 masks so people wouldn't inhale mold spores while tearing out drywall and cabinets and flooring that had been damaged by flood water. The excess N95 masks would also become a convenient stockpile of PPE for COVID-19 when they became impossible to order. So the flood response lasted roughly 3 weeks and then I took off most of the last week of February off since I had been working crazy hours and 3 weekends in a row.
I came back from that time off to the first case of COVID-19 in my county being announced on Monday, March 2 and immediately transitioned to full time COVID-19 work. At the time, I was the only staff member at my host site who had taken the WHO COVID-19 trainings since I did those for fun/out of interest way before they became relevant on a local scale. Since March, I've participated in our incident command meetings, been part of our PPE supply monitoring team, helped with a COVID-19 surveillance study, crated educational materials, sent out links with updated guidance from CDC and the Oregon Health Authority on a regular basis, and all kinds of other tasks. It's been stressful, but exactly the type of work I've always wanted to do. Now that things are calming down and other Tribal entities are returning to work slowly I'm working on finding a balance between doing COVID-19 related work and trying to get our CHA back on track after taking a 4 month hiatus from it.
Every person's experience will be different, but there's generally some leeway for you to create the experience you're looking for like I did with getting to work in emergency response. If you get assigned to a program area or a project that you aren't excited about I wouldn't let that discourage you from accepting the position. Put in the work on that project and then talk with both your host site supervisor and your CDC supervisor about how you can create opportunities for what your really want to do in addition to your main project assignments. Maybe that looks like getting permission to block out a few hours a week to take trainings you're interested in or to shadow something another department is working on at your host site. The best part of this program being designed to be a training program for people new to the world of working in public health is that there's flexibility to make sure the host site work gets done while still having the ability to learn about or experience other things you have an interest in and that may help you meet those program benchmarks I talked about earlier.
This was incredibly long and I feel like maybe I'm rambling a bit, but feel free to message me or respond to this with questions and I'll do my best to answer them
