Fascinating set of postings that I am finding quite helpful!! Just a couple of points to add for clarification if I may.
Finally, the program at OHSU focuses on Epidemiology and Biostatistics and requires a thesis. We do this NOT because we want to make everyone an epidemiologists or a biostatistician or even a researcher - but we want to graduate physicians who are well grounded - through both classroom study and applied experience - in the basic sciences of public health...who can take those skills into the clinical or health systems or program or policy arenas with whatever specialty interest and use them well.
The program at OHSU is NOT for everyone and it does not do everything...but what is DOES do it does quite well. So "an MPH is not an MPH is not an MPH" means not that our program is second rate - to the contrary we do a FIRST rate job of providing our graduates with good training in the fundamentals of the public health sciences. It means that we don't do ir have available everything students want - so if a student wants a heavy dose of International Health or Maternal and Child Health this is not the place to come. We do prepare folks quite well to go into those (and other) areas with a pretty rich tool box and we do have available experiences within various areas of public health - but we can't give extensive experiences in those fields simply because that isn't what we do.
Thanks