Hi everyone! I am currently trying to decide on attending UMich for Global Health Epidemiology, Yale for Environmental Health Science, and Emory for Global Health. I will only be able to attend the admitted students day at Michigan, so I am a little nervous to make this decision without visiting all their campuses. Does anyone have any experience with these schools that could offer me some insight on their programs? Any information would be greatly appreciated!
It might help to make an excel sheet with the schools and rank them in each category such as:
1. Geography/facilities: Do you like the facilities, do you like the location? Even more so, would you want to work near/in this location? To one degree or another, where you go to school might funnel your career decisions and public health schools have a regional reputation.
2. Research interests: If you have a niche research interest, then definitely look at faculty and see what is available at each school, this will save you time before you start school wherever you go.
3. Academics/Class structure: What sort of education atmosphere works best for you? Look at the mechanics of how the school works, when classes are, etc . . .
4. Tuition: Yeah, this is important as well, look at what debt burden you are comfortable with, scholarships, living expenses.
5. See where graduates find work, you might see some interesting pattern, talk to graduates and current students if possible, something that might seem trivial to somebody else might mean something to you or give you more insight into the school.
An MPH is sort of a generalist degree, concentrations like "global health" might be less competitive to get into as they might teach more soft skills, and might be enjoyable just from a global health interest perspective, but see what hard skills are offered as well, and if there are opportunities to learn skills that employers want, though I think that Emory could pull off a great global health concentration. Yale is supposed to be very good at research and is a smaller program, if you want a PhD then Yale might be a good place to go, UMich is definitely a strong program.
