Need some quick advice / insight

[jmelinte]

I am a former pre-med who graduated last summer with a Biology major, Chemistry minor. My GPA was only about 3.15, so I was advised to take some graduate level coursework, most likely get my masters, and then apply to medical school. I applied to both an MPH program and a Biomedical Engineering program, got accepted to both, and ended up choosing the BME program mostly because I thought the challenge would look harder. I am now finding out that I am in way over my head, since I haven't had calculus in 5 years (tested out of it during college through AP courses back in high school), I've only had basic physics, and I've never had an engineering class in my life. I am strongly contemplating dropping this program and going into MPH instead, since it seems to not only be more along my area of interest, but I would imagine my background qualifies me a bit more for it than the BME program. However, I don't know much about the coursework and my main fear is switching only to find out I made another uneducated decision. Can someone give me a quick rundown on the difficulty level I would encounter considering my undergraduate background, and whether this would be a good idea? I've tried to find some information online about MPH difficulty qualification levels based on undergraduate coursework but nothing has turned up. One of the tracks that interests me focuses in epidemiology, but there is also an healthcare administration path which may be intersting as well. I will be calling the MPH program I was admitted into and see if I would be able to start a term into the year (so I don't have to reapply and wait another year). I just feel a bit lost because I've never been put in a situation like this before and I'm trying to make sure that my decision will put me back on the right track.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[jmelinte]

Is there anyone around that knows anything about my particular situation?

 

[namazu]

People are around who know stuff, but you might have to give them 24h or more to reply!

MPH programs in epidemiology usually involve learning a fair amount of biostatistics and one or more computing packages, types of study designs and when to use them, how to be sure you're measuring what you intend to measure, etc. A lot of it boils down to common sense, but much of it is stuff you wouldn't necessarily think to watch for if you weren't trained. If you are motivated and have a reasonably good aptitude for statistics, terminology, and reasoning (the latter two you'll need for med school, anyway) you should be fine. The course load probably won't be light - in a 1- or 2-year master's program there's a lot of material to fit in - but the material should be doable.

That said, I would add a few cautions. While grading tends to be more forgiving in grad school than in undergrad, don't expect straight A's, necessarily. Also, be aware that leaving your BME program and entering an MPH program may be a red flag to a med school adcom, suggesting that a) you don't really have a clear direction, and b) you're just doing it to improve your GPA. Most epidemiology classes, while based in stats and biology, and beneficial to someone who clearly wants to combine medicine with public health, will not be viewed as evidence of "hard science" ability by a med school adcom. Finally, many schools, especially those iwht a 1-year MPH program, will not let you enter in the second term because of the way the sequence of classes goes. Oh, and MPH programs are expensive.

So, I'd say go ahead with the MPH only if you are truly interested in it. If your major motivation is simply to bolster your GPA, enroll in a post-bacc program if you qualify (though with a bio major and chem minor, they may say you wouldn't benefit) or at the grad school of your choice as a non-degree student and take a carefully-chosen set of classes that will teach you things you want or need to know and make your credentials look better.

Hope things work out!

 

[jmelinte]

I suppose I should have added this in the original post. The program I'm looking at entering is definitely a 2-year one, and is actually about half the cost of my BME program. As for the track, I am very flexible. I was also under the impression that if I did not submit transcripts / proof of enrollment in a program that I left, a medical school could not pull these records, but I could be very wrong. I am also much more interested in the healthcare aspect of MPH than I am in the molecular and biochemical research aspects of the BME program, but chose the BME anyway because of the "prestige" I figured it would hold over MPH to an adcom.