I’ll go against the naysayers and say I’m happy I did this, and you should absolutely go for it if you want to.
I am getting mine through my home institution because they offered a serious discount (like more than 75% off) to current students. I am finishing up my last class now. It’s a nice little feather that gives me an additional opportunity to communicate with the residency programs I’ve interviewed with to update them of my new degree obtained during the interview season and reinforce my interest in their programs without looking desperate, at least.
I felt like my MPH coursework was a “break” from med school because I got to use my brain and critically think instead of blindly memorizing facts, and I think it helped me avoid burnout because I got to switch it up in my day to day life and could do things other than just Anki endlessly. I do not feel like this would be true for you if you are doing it accelerated in one year, instead of doing it along with your DO courses. I would recommend doing it now and doing something else in your year off, if you really feel like you have to take a year off for some reason.
The data on Charting Outcomes does not show that helps at all to have an extra graduate degree, but I wonder how many of those people with graduate degrees really leveraged them in interviews and talked about the way they were going to use the skills they obtained with degree in the future, both in the residency program and as an attending physician. It has come up in many of my interviews so far and has been positively received when I talk about the extra skills I picked up like community needs assessments, extra biostats training, writing policy documents, etc. and I discussed how I could use these skills in either their current outreach programs or starting new outreach programs in my areas of interest. One program told me they had lost their grant writer… it would probably be helpful to them that I have done grant writing work in my classes lol. Those conversations always flew and the interviewers were very engaged, so those interviews definitely went well.
I’d say go wherever is cheapest for you tbh. The price matters more than the institution.
