– [Phil] Hello, and welcome to the online Master of Public Health Programs,
student spotlight webinar presented by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
My name is Phil Soloria, I am a Graduate Admissions Advisor for the Master of Public Health Program,
and I will be your host for today’s webinar.
I would like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today.
To begin, I’d like to review what you can expect during this presentation. To cut down on background noise,
everyone is on listen only mode, and if you’re experiencing any technical difficulties,
please be sure to refresh your browser. And if you have any questions for any of our speakers,
please type them in the Q&A box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and hit send.
Feel free to enter any questions as you think of them, and we’ll be sure to answer as many questions
as time allows at the end of the presentation. Also a copy of this presentation and recording
will be available soon. I’m going to pass this over to Doctor Shubha Kumar,
PhD, MPH, to touch on her experience and work within the program.
Good afternoon, Doctor Kumar. – [Shubha] Hi Phil, good afternoon.
Hi everybody, thank you for joining us. We’re thrilled to be presenting this webinar today
with two of our fantastic recent graduates. This webinar series has actually been inspired
by our students. I was so impressed with the work our students are doing all around the world, both during and after their program.
And so we decided to launch a webinar where we could feature them and folks to hear about the excellent work
that they’re doing. So very excited for the two speakers that we have today. I’ll share a little bit more about them in a moment.
Prior to that, I’ll give you a little bit of background about myself. So I direct the online MPH program here at USC.
I’m an Associate Professor in the department, and I specifically work in the Division of Global Health
as well as at the Institute on Inequalities in Global Health. And I did my MPH in health services
and my PhD in the same area. And prior to academia, I was really involved
in the work with international NGOs, humanitarian and disaster relief and development work,
and my research in that area still continues in addition to teaching and overseeing
our education programs. A little bit about the School of Medicine here at USC.
So Keck School of Medicine was established in 1885. We’re actually the oldest medical school in Southern California.
We are affiliated with several hospitals and institutes and centers doing a fantastic research.
And within the School of Medicine, the MPH program is located within the Department of Preventive Medicine.
Our department name is actually about to change as of tomorrow, to the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences,
to be a little more reflective of what we really do, but our department is very huge.
We are essentially the size of the School of Public Health with over a hundred faculty, doing research in all kinds of areas within public health.
And we are organized into six divisions. So Disease Prevention, Global Health, Bioinformatics,
Biostatistics, Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, Environmental Health, and Health Behavior Research.
And so many of our faculty doing both research and teaching in these different areas of public health.
So the program itself, I’m sure you all have heard a little bit about it, but it’s essentially, it’s a two-year online program.
Some students go on an accelerated track and finish the program in one year and we offer six different concentrations,
including biostatistics and epidemiology, which tends to be very popular with folks
who are either in a clinical or research setting. We also offer a track in community health promotion,
which is quite attractive to students who are looking to work with communities more directly in terms of kind of broad community health campaigns,
messaging in clinics, et cetera. We have a track in geo health,
which is a unique concentration that we offer specifically here through our online program at USC,
which is essentially a combination of the application of spatial sciences and geo health field and public health.
So kinda understanding how place and location affects health and health outcomes.
We also offer a concentration in global health, which tends to be attractive to students who are looking at a more global perspective of health
and are interested in working in various parts of the world. We also offer a concentration in health services and policy,
which is really focused domestically, so on US health care services and policy for the most part.
And then we have a generalist concentration, which is aimed at students who may be farther along in their careers, have a previous master’s
or advanced degree, and are looking to kinda pick and choose their concentrations in public health
and what courses they would like to pursue. So in addition to students completing core courses,
as well as the concentration courses, in one of the areas I just mentioned, students also complete a practicum
and essentially it’s basically like an internship at an agency of your choosing.
We have affiliations with over 300 agencies around the world, and that list is constantly growing
based on our students’ interests and where they want to get their foot in the door, where they would like to work,
and it’s about a 300-hour requirement that students tend to do towards their last semester,
or maybe last two semesters of the program depending on how they wanna split up those hours.
And it’s really an opportunity to get your foot in the door at an organization where you may want to work in the future,
or maybe even working at the organization you currently are involved at that maybe in a kind of different capacity.
So it’s meant to be an opportunity to expose you to a new aspect of public health and folks to network with,
to hopefully maybe land your next gig after graduation if that’s what you’re interested in.
We’ve had students do their practicum with various agencies around the world, whether it’s, you know, small NGO in through Uganda all the way
to the World Health Organization, to LA County Department of Public Health, various organizations so
depending on the student’s interests. And you’re gonna hear a little bit more about how our two graduates did
and what they did for their practicum as we go through the next. So, quickly I would like to just give you
a little bit of background about our two students, our graduate presenters today. First, I’d like to introduce Andrew Blank.
He is a recent graduate with a concentration in global health. Andrew is amazing,
he not only, you know, was a student during the program, but obviously he was also active service
and amazing to be doing work of that kind, also doing a degree and also took on a leadership role
within our Master of Public Health Student Association, among many other things he was doing. So, I’ll let him share more with you,
but he’s got a background in biochemistry from the United States Naval Academy. He served as an MPH Student Association President,
he’s currently supporting UC San Diego Center for Community Health as a refugee health intern, and as an active duty US Navy submarine lieutenant.
He will be joining the public health workforce full-time later this summer.
Next I’d like to introduce Vijaya Seegulam, Vijaya graduated with the biostatistics
and epidemiology concentration, and her background is in biological sciences from Florida Atlantic.
She also took on a leadership role within our student association as the Director of Online Student Relations.
And she currently works as a research project manager at Boston University School of Public Health,
researching mental health outcomes and their association to unique life events. So really thrilled to hear from both of our graduates.
And please do feel free to ask questions at the end of the presentation.
So at this point, I am going to go ahead and turn it over to Andrew.
– [Andrew] Thank you so much Doctor Kumar, and thank you everyone for being here tonight. I think this is a really awesome investment of your time
to learn about, you know, a program that I’m so proud of, and that has been so significant to the last couple of years of my life.
So I’m really excited that all of you are here and I hope that you have something you can take away
from either my story or more likely from Vijaya’s whose is as pretty amazing. So, I’ll kick us off.
My name is Andrew, and I just graduated in this past December.
And before I start, I do wanna say that all the views that I’ll be expressing tonight are my own and do not represent those of the US Navy
or Department of Defense. So, like Doctor Kumar said, I got my start at the US Naval Academy.
It’s a four-year undergraduate school in Annapolis, Maryland. I went there and then commissioned into the United States Navy
where I became a submarine officer and I’ve spent the past six plus years
driving nuclear powered submarines around the world and serving in a number of different capacities and throughout my career,
the primary driving force and the most motivational part of what I’ve been privileged to do is to work with some incredible people.
So in each of these different places that I’ve gotten to serve and at each of these commands,
although the job I’ve been doing has been quite interesting and challenging from a technical perspective,
the most exciting and meaningful part has been to get to serve alongside such incredible people and build those relationships.
Now, I started at the Naval Academy in the fall of 2010. And so one of the most formative experiences
early on in my Naval career was on May 1st, 2011, right at the end of my freshman year in college.
And that was when the United States killed Osama bin Laden, who was the mastermind behind major attacks
against the United States. And so this was a significant milestone in the global war on terror,
being at a school that was producing officers to commission into the United States Navy and Marine Corps, it was seen as a highly significant event
that was widely celebrated throughout our school. This is a picture from the courtyard in front of our dormitory at around midnight that night,
where we had all been celebrating and singing and dancing and all those things. So as I was entering this career,
that was kind of the perspective that I was coming in with is this is something to be celebrated and this is how we work for peace around the world.
And that continued when I was on my boat. So my particular job on the submarine was the assistant weapons officer.
So I was responsible for all the Tomahawk missiles on board and SSGN which is a submarine class
that carries more missiles on board than any other ship in the history of the world. And here are the six countries
that the United States military has sent those Tomahawk missiles into in the last 25, 30 years or so.
And you can see both the human development index score. So that’s just a measure essentially
of the situation in a country and how they’re doing in terms of health and human rights, and a number of other factors.
You can see that all of the countries that we’ve dropped these bombs on are doing very poorly
across a wide range of factors. And then you can see that we’ve sent hundreds if not thousands of bombs into those countries.
So that was my job. And that was something that was very technically challenging.
And like I said, it was a privilege to be able to serve with incredible people. I’m really grateful for that and proud of my service.
But at the same time, I became disillusioned with cruise missile diplomacy, with the idea that the way to bring peace or justice
or equity to parts of the world like are shown on the screen is by dropping war heads on these places.
And you saw, maybe perhaps you saw on the news two days ago, we just dropped more bombs into Syria and Iraq.
This continues to be our methods of doing that. And I decided that this wasn’t how
I wanted to spend the rest of my professional career. So that’s when I started looking into graduate school
and I did that based on what my value systems were and how I wanted to bring about those ideas of justice
and equity and peace and all of those things. And for me personally, those ideas stem from largely from my faith.
So I happened to be of a Protestant tradition, and there’s a passage in Matthew where Jesus is talking to his disciples
and he says that “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty, you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me”. Although the disciples say,
we don’t remember doing any of that. What are you talking about crazy guy? And he says, “Truly I say to you,
as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me”. And so that has really driven
kind of how I’ve tried to serve and bring about justice and equity and all those things in the world is using love
rather than Tomahawk missile. And if you are not a Christ follower,
I hope that you’re able to find inspiration to love and practice those ideas from other sources.
Perhaps if you read the Quran, you’ll see that it says to do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, those in need,
neighbors who are near, neighbors who are strangers, the companion by your side, the wayfarer you meet, and what your right hands possess.
In Leviticus or in the Torah it says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now, Doctor Martin Luther King. Jr.
in this letter from Birmingham jail, as we will, will we be extremists for hate or for love?
So, I present all of these together just to say that, although I particularly draw my passion
from this one source, I hope that each of you in whatever motivates you, you’re able to also see the value loving our neighbor.
And so, looking to love our neighbor I came to the Master of Public Health Program at USC,
wanted to do that through public health. But I didn’t want to just be a student, especially since I was an online student.
It’s really easy in this program, if you want to just do your work and stay at a black box on a screen,
you can do that and you will graduate. But the value in this program is the people.
Just like when I was in the Navy, the same thing held true within this program I learned so much more from my peers,
my classmates, my professors, and some of the staff here in our program
than I could have ever learned from a textbook. And so I wanted to invest in our program,
both for my own personal growth and to build a better program for the next generation. So after about one year in the program,
elections came up for the Master of Public Health Student Association. And I along with several of my friends
decided to run and we ran for a number of reasons to try and leave this program in a direction that would bring more equity
to online students. Prior to this past school year, the Master of Public Health Student Association board
has always had 10 members and only one of those members had been online. And that had been the case
for the entire history of the program. But on our board, we were able to bring in seven online students,
along with our three in-person students who are able to better reflect the diversity of this program.
And by having that diversity, we were able to implement a number of changes to our program
in order to support all of the students who are here taking this course. So whether you’re interested in the online
or on campus program, I’ve been able to work with people who are working on both sides of that
and tell you that it’s an incredible program in whichever platform you decide to enroll in whatever supports the stage of life that you’re in.
Now, there are a number of kind of global events that significantly impacted my time
as a master of public health student, being that I was here from 2019 to 2020.
One of those is that the United States finally had a kind of national reckoning
with our history of systemic racism. So part of that is due to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery,
Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Part of that is recognizing that the disproportionate impact
of police violence against black Americans as compared to any other race or ethnicity.
And there are so many complex factors that go into why and how there are systems and structures
of oppression that do not provide equity or fair opportunities to people who don’t look like me,
or don’t come from a neighborhood that I came from, or don’t pray to the same God that I pray to.
And so, that has been a significant conversation around our country and within public health.
Over the past couple of years the American Public Health Association declared systemic racism a public health crisis,
police violence as a public health crisis. And so, it was a really important time to be in the Master of Public Health Program
to be able to explore the ways that this discipline can work, to try and dismantle some of those structures of oppression.
So even just in a very practical, low level sense, I just talked about being on the student government
and Master of Public Health Student Association. So a few of the things we were able to do is to form a diversity equity and inclusion council
within the Department of Preventative Medicine that will look at these kinds of big picture changes
to make sure that our curriculum and our program are better supporting all students, regardless of their backgrounds.
We were able to change admissions requirements, for example, removing the GRE as admissions requirements,
which provides more equity in access to students. And there’s a number of other ways
that we were able to respond to this. So those are some of the structural responses to systemic racism in my experience at USC.
And then on a more personal level, there’s a capstone event that every student does
at the end of this program. So capstone is kind of a cumulative experience where you’re able to put a lot of the ideas
that you’ve learned and incorporate some of the classes you’ve taken into one project. I chose to do my project
on the disproportionate impact of breast cancer on women in Gaza,
as compared to women who live in Israel. And I chose that based on the racism
that we were responding to and recognizing in the United States and understanding that that intersectionality has parallels with racism
in that is being applied to people who are living in the occupied Palestinian territory.
If you’re interested in learning more about that, Angela Davis has a really good book on it, but I chose to write about breast cancer in Gaza.
So here you can see a couple of the kind of pieces of data that drove my research. You can see that there is,
has been and continues to be a significant disparity in life expectancy for people living in Israel
or the Palestinian territories. There’s a huge difference in mortality for so many different causes of death.
I just put a few of them up here when looking at children and looking at kind of those more vulnerable age ranges,
which are typically a very good kind of measure that gives you a good sense of how
the health or rights situation of a country is going. In the bottom left is where I really focused.
And so this is a graph that shows applications for people in Gaza to leave Gaza with a medical permit
in order to get treatment inside of Israel. And the line shown in purple
are permits that were approved, but what’s shown in the orange and the pink are permits that were either denied
or more often just never responded to in either direction. So they were just delayed
until that person did not have a chance to go to their appointment. So because of the structural racism that exists in Gaza
and the Palestinian territories, people who are trying to leave Gaza
in order to get treatment, they don’t have access to within Gaza, they have to ask for permission
and they get denied that permission and then they suffer higher mortality because of it. So there are several numbers they’re shown on the right,
but you can see that Palestinian women are significantly less likely to survive five years after breast cancer diagnosis.
Breast cancer cases are going up in Palestine and 60% of breast cancer cases
in Palestine in 2016 were preventable. So it’s these kinds of ideas
that are just a huge injustice in our world that are related to policy.
And that’s something I’m really grateful for this program for showing me is how public health is not just about
treating an acute condition or something clinical, it’s about looking at the built environment,
the social determinants of health and equity and all of these systems that play into the health of a community.
So that’s why I did my capstone on Gaza. And then as Doctor Kumar talked about,
there’s also an opportunity to do a practicum. So a practicum is where you spend a number of hours
working for a public health organization, or someone engaged in that work. I happened to be stationed in San Diego.
And so I found an organization within the UC San Diego Center for Community Health called the Refugee Health Unit.
There’s just two full-time staff members there. One has a master of public health, one, a master of public policy,
and their mission is to protect, promote, and improve the physical, mental, and financial well-being
of the refugee population in San Diego county. Doctor Kumar also mentioned the affiliation agreement
that’s required for a practicum, which USDA had not previously had an affiliation agreement
with this particular program, but that paperwork went through very quickly. The office is very efficient at processing that,
so don’t let that be a perceived barrier to you in finding something meaningful in the place that you live.
When I first got involved with the Refugee Health Unit, it was January of 2020. So COVID had not yet made a significant impact
on the United States and life was fairly normal here. And so my first role was to evaluate a program
called Making Connections for Mental Health and Well-being for Young Men. And so that’s a program that’s run nationwide
by the Prevention Institute, and it’s implemented locally in San Diego by an organization called the United Women of East Africa Support Team.
And my job was to go in and say, this program has been running for two years, supporting primarily men who are ages 14 to 24,
who are from East African countries, such as Somalia or Ethiopia or Sudan,
and to try and use a lot of the different theories and ideas and principles I’ve learned in this program
to figure out if this program that we’re running was effective. If so, why and how could other programs
model it after them? And also to find ways that that program could improve.
And then COVID-19 happened. Luckily prior, just prior to COVID-19,
the Refugee Health Unit had stood up the San Diego Refugee Communities coalition. So this is a collective of about
a dozen ethnic community-based organizations in San Diego. You can see a number of them listed here,
and you can also see that many of them represent specific communities of refugees.
For example, the Haitian Bridge Alliance supports refugees from Haiti. Whereas the Southern Sudanese Community Center
represents refugees from South Sudan, but there are a number of others that represent all refugees or wider groups of refugees
like the Majdal Center, which is the Arab Community Center in San Diego. So the Refugee Communities Coalition came together
in order to build equity and amplify voices of refugees in San Diego, recognizing that each of these smaller
community-based organizations on their own would not be able to create a large scale change,
but by joining forces, we would be able to build on those strengths and support each other,
and the experts in these different topic areas to support refugees in San Diego.
Because we already had that structure in place when COVID-19 really became a significant problem
in the United States, we were able to very quickly stand up a network of community health workers.
So community health workers are people who are from within particularly vulnerable or disenfranchised or marginalized communities,
such as refugees and they are trusted messengers of health information.
So me being a Protestant white male from San Diego,
I may not have as much luck going into a group of Iraqi immigrants
as someone who is Iraqi and speaks Arabic fluently and understands the culture
and has well established relationships and trust with that community. So we’ve really used that idea in order to leverage
those strong relationships and that trust that’s there in order to convey important information
about COVID-19 for the last year and a half or so. And so one of my primary roles within my practicum
was to train those community health workers. So we would have meetings of about 25 community health workers,
where I would discuss with them ideas about COVID-19 regulations within the state of California
or the city or county of San Diego. I would talk about different behaviors related to COVID-19 or testing or vaccination.
And the important thing was just to get them quality information that they could bring reliably to their communities.
There’s a lot of misinformation about COVID-19, as well as a lot of gaps in access to information
for communities that maybe have lower English proficiency. And so health literacy is extremely important
and impacts a lot of refugee communities in San Diego. So that was a really exciting role for me.
And that’s primarily how I spent my practicum was supporting these community health workers in fighting COVID-19.
Now I am getting out of the Navy here in the next couple of months. And so, I have been pivoting from my practicum
to look for a job. And there are a number of resources out there to support you in your process of looking for a job.
A great place to start if you’re enrolled in our program is with the Public Health Career services website,
and there’s a place on there called Public Health Connection, and that will list job opportunities
within public health that are specifically hand-selected for USC graduates.
And so they may be well tailored to the program that we’ve gone through or the experience we’ve had,
the network that we’ve built. So that’s a great place to start. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has a great job board, as well as Idealist
is a great place to look if you’re looking to get involved in community service type public health.
I’m also leaving military so for anyone interested in organization supporting veterans there are a number of them out there
that have a lot of great different types of programs. One that I’d like to highlight is at Syracuse, the Institute for Veterans and Military Families,
they provide a free opportunity to take the project management professional course and get that certification,
which will really help with translating some of your skills to the civilian sector. And then with applications themselves,
I just want to make sure that you are kind of clear-eyed about the situation that will be awaiting you
when you apply to jobs and public health. If the incredibly important, meaningful time to be in this field, as a result of that,
there are a lot of people applying for these jobs. And so it is very common and normal and acceptable
and not something to be disappointed by or ashamed about, if you apply to dozens of jobs
and hear nothing back and don’t get interviews. And that’s how I started. I cast a pretty wide net with my applications.
I applied to a lot of different places. There were ranging from smaller local nonprofits to very large national
or internationally known organizations. And I had a lot of really positive experiences
with different companies and organizations going through the application with some of them job interviews
and even getting job offers and trying to navigate what that looks like. And so I actually just this morning
accepted a job offer from Novant, which is a healthcare system primarily in North and South Carolina.
And I will be working as a service delivery specialist within the human, the people and culture department,
which is essentially their human relations department. So I’ll be in their center for operational excellence, serving as an internal kind of performance coach
and working to improve programs and processes as I expand into a new area of North Carolina called Wilmington.
So that’s the exciting news for me on my job search, but I bring that up to say
that not everyone gets a job from day one, and you will go through months of not hearing anything.
So don’t get discouraged. One day you will have four people knocking on your door asking for interviews,
and you’ll find a really great landing spot to apply the things that you’ve been learning in this program.
A couple of other tools to leave you with that will help you to succeed as a Master of Public Health Student.
Citations are really important. So I recommend using a citation software, Zotero is my favorite, but there are others out there.
The Noun Project is great for finding symbols or smaller pieces of art
that support some of your presentations that you’re doing. Or if you want pictures, stock photos,
then Unsplash will give you those without any sort of watermark or payments required on them.
Qualtrics is something you’ll have access to as a USC student, and that has more advanced capabilities
than Google Forms would. So I recommend using that if you want to kind of
dig into deeper analysis with your surveys. The Community Tool Box is a great source for any sort of community organizing you’re trying to do.
They have different chapters about all sorts of goals that you might have and methods of getting there.
And then Capterra is a source if you want to compare different types of software, whether you’re looking for something
to keep track of what tasks you’re doing, or your finances or any other sort of application.
And then my last encouragement to you would be to keep reading. I’ve found personally in my life that when I’ve gone through stages that were more stressful
or busy, I have stopped reading for pleasure. And that has really hurt me.
So, where I learned so much from is from other people’s experiences and other people’s research.
So even if you enter this program, which is a fairly rigorous academic program, that will take a lot of your time,
I recommend that you continue to read things that will challenge you, things that are written by people who
have a different background than you do, or a different opinion than you do. So here are 10 books that have really meant a lot to me
in the past two years or so. If there’s anything on here that looks interesting to you, this covers a pretty wide range
from not being about public health at all, but being kind of about ideas and people and motivation to systemic racism,
to United States politics, to more practical applications to global health,
but whatever it is that interests you keep reading and don’t just read a biostatistics textbook for two years,
because as much as Vijaya learned a ton from that, and is brilliant,
that is not maybe something that will sustain that fire that’s in your heart that you’re hopefully looking for.
So that’s been my experience. I’m so grateful for all the people that I’ve been able to learn and serve with. The people are the best part of any program.
These are just a few of the ones who’ve made my experience so great. If there’s anything that I’ve done or said that resonated with you,
or you have any questions or anything I can do to help you, please reach out by email, by Twitter, by LinkedIn,
any other way you want to connect and fight on. And now I will introduce my friend
Vijaya to tell you about her time at USC.
– [Vijaya] Thanks Andrew, great presentation. And it’s tough act to follow, but I’ll try my best.
Hi everyone, my name is the Vijaya Seegulam, and I’m a recent graduate of the online MPH program like Andrew.
And I’m happy to now share why I decided on USC’s online MPH program and what my experiences in the program were.
So to start us off, I’m gonna share a little bit about my background and how I ended up at USC in the MPH program.
So I attended Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, from where I earned my bachelor’s in biological sciences.
And at that time I was aiming to pursue medical school immediately after my gap year. So I started working as an emergency room medical scribe
to gain clinical hours. I was really focused as a pre-med and determined to get as much out of the experience as possible.
So I would work double shifts, meaning 10 to 12 hours standing on my feet all day.
And I would work night shifts or graveyard shifts as they’re commonly called in the ER from 9:00 pm to 7:00 am.
So Red Bull was my friend and I would work across multiple different ERs and trauma centers trying to learn more about
the community and the surrounding areas of each facility. I was also privy to many difficult conversations
the doctors had with patients about insurance and ethical versus moral choices.
And I was witness to the countless hours and hours that the physicians put into their work.
Some actually took home their charting after their shifts were finished, which I thought was crazy,
but they were super dedicated. And throughout my time there, I gained so much experience and knowledge about
the medical procedures, medications, and overall, I learned a lot of physicians to patients soft skills.
And at that point I was able to make a clear distinction as to what my expectations were
and what the actual reality of working in this field was. I realized that bio medicine can help individuals
one-on-one when they are sick, the goal of public health, which is to prevent illness and injury
and to do so across large numbers of people at a time set my professional goals better.
So basically I was able to decide that the reason that had initially attracted me to healthcare
and medicine would be better suited towards pursuing the Master of Public Health, simply because I felt more of a passion
to care for the health of all people and to improve their quality of life on a larger scales.
So in my search for MPH programs, I happened to come across USC’s program.
And after exploring the website, I filled out a form to request more information. And I was contacted by Phil,
who introduced us at the beginning of this presentation. I can honestly and truthfully say
that he started my MPS journey at USC because he made the application process very easy for me.
And he had the patience to answer all the questions, the countless questions that I asked him,
which was an achievement in and of itself. So, to go a little bit deeper into why specifically
I chose USC online MPH program, I have the following criteria I use to guide me
in my decision making process. So first I wanted to be able to work while earning my degree
because as a student, it was essential to me that I also have a sustainable living income
while I pursued my higher education goals. So the online program essentially guaranteed this
because I was able to work during the week full-time and still use my evenings and weekends to focus on studying and finishing assignments.
I also really wanted a program that would rigorously prepare me academically if I wanted to take an additional step
into doctoral studies. And this was met after looking into the concentrations,
the program offered as well as the curriculum being taught. Lastly, I wanted a great networking environment.
So I spoke to current and past students who all said that they were very happy with the opportunities and professional support they had.
On this side you’ll see pictures I took on the retirements while at the library, studying here in Florida.
On the left is a picture of the trademark South Florida view I had from the library and on the right is what most of my time in the program
was spent actually doing, which was studying into most of the hours of the weekend to make that work/study balance really work.
And the program, my concentration biostatistics/EPI, which I chose because of my interest in learning more about
EPI methods, data analysis and clinical research principles. So on the side, there are some key concepts
that I learned in this concentration that I would like to highlight. One was the ability to use statistical procedures,
techniques, and methodologies to identify health trends. And I felt like this was accomplished
through mastery of a following statistical softwares, SPPS, SAS and STATA.
Here are my principles of EPI course. I can say that I was able to determine what causes disease and injury based on the knowledge I gained from that course.
And lastly, I was able to master, identifying and investigating trends that influence disease.
I was able to evaluate preventative measures and the efficacy of new treatments. And I think the three courses below
are what really benefited me in learning these key concepts.
Just anecdotally the picture on the left was my desk this past summer, the summer of 2020,
that I actually took a picture because I remember this moment when I had finally finished, what I thought was the most academically
rigorous course in the program taught by Doctor Goodrich, who is one of my favorite professors ironically.
Throughout most of my academic career, I have struggled with mathematical concepts the most,
and in this particular course called data analysis, I was able to really master the material
through the guidance I received from the live sessions and communicating with the professor via email.
So, this actually ended up being a huge advantage for me professionally, because I now still apply the concepts
that I learned in the course in my work environment.
So, moving on to the next slide, being a part of the online MPH program meant that I was given a lot of opportunity
to participate in extracurricular activities. One of those was the 2020 Global Health Case Competition,
which brings together teams of students from all disciplines to tackle
a critical global health challenge. After networking and forming a team with former other students,
we were given two weeks to propose realistic solutions to a panel of judges who would then decide the winner.
Our team ended up placing first and was chosen then to represent USC at the International Global Health Case Competition
at Emory University at Atlanta, Georgia. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
we completed this competition virtually. I will say that this is one of the most notable moments
in this whole competition and experience because we received guidance from so many renown USC faculty,
and I also became very close friends with the four girls who were on my team in particular.
Despite being an online student, you can see in the top right picture that I was able to participate in extracurriculars
and they also found a great comradery among my teammates who I still know and keep in contact with today.
Another great part about being an online MPH student was the ability to participate
in our own student association. So the Master of Public Health Student Association, or MAPHSA as it’s commonly called,
represents USC’s MPH students both online and on-campus, as Andrew mentioned.
Here’s a photo of the board this past year where Andrew was our president and I was the Director of Online Student Relations.
Some of my responsibilities included coordinating online student activities and events,
and I was responsible for using social media accounts to do advertising and marketing for our student activities and announcements.
Essentially, my role in MAPHSA was to be a student representative for the online student community, and within this position in particular,
I truly felt like I was able to be part of USC even though I was a online student.
I made so many great friends like Andrew, and connections through my participation.
And I would definitely say that this is one of the highlights of being in the program for me.
Speaking of great friends, as an online student, I was able to form a support network
with some of my classmates that were in the same concentration and cohort as me. And one of these classmates
actually became one of my closest friends since we spent three to four hours every week studying on Zoom and we still do so even post-graduation
just to catch up with each other once a week. But in the context of this particular side, she was actually a person that recommended me
for the current profession that I now have and absolutely love, which is with Boston University
in the School of Public Health specifically in the EPI department.
So my position within BU is a research project manager. And I focus specifically on psych EPI research.
My responsibilities include coordinating internal and external research projects, and I’m accountable for the entire scope of a research grant
in particular, the National Institute of Health Grants, such as Subawards, RO1s and P50s.
I developed a motto for myself, which is, on time on budget and within scope,
which kind of encompasses my duties at BU. On the right you’ll see a picture of kind of going through what a project lifestyle looks like
and what I oversee are some of the steps of project management. So it includes finding funding,
developing on the proposal with your principal investigator, making sure that you route and submit the proposal
through the appropriate channels and that the project is set up and ready to go, if it is approved for funding.
Of course, as a project manager, I manage the project and see it out to completion.
So I close out the project in the final step. So another amazing opportunity that I’ve had working at BU
has been being able to contribute to scientific research papers. So here’s an example of a paper that we just submitted
and is now published of which I am a co-author on. This paper is entitled a comorbid mental disorder paradox,
using causal diagrams to understand associations between post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
The basis of this paper centers around the fact that although some studies document that post-traumatic stress disorder
or PTSD increases suicide, other studies have produced the paradoxical finding that PTSD decreases suicide.
So in this paper, we sought to understand methodological biases that may explain these paradoxical findings
and through the use of direct acyclic graph, which are known as DAGs,
that’s a funny EPI term. If you’re interested in psych EPI or EPI in general,
I highly recommend that you check out our paper and its findings.
So while working at BU, I was able to join the Society for Epidemiological Research,
which is the oldest and largest epidemiology society in North America.
Post-graduation, I’m now considered a master’s level epidemiologist. As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic
has really put the spotlight on epidemiology and the importance of clinical research along with the incredible work
that happens behind the scenes, and as such, I was really fortunate to be featured
in two “New York Times” articles, as you can see here. For me it truly felt like a moment of success
as I was featured in these articles alongside experts like Doctor Fauci, and other renown epidemiologists in the field.
I will be honest with you guys, I did fangirl just seeing my name kind of in the same article as Doctor Fauci,
who is like the rock star of the COVID-19 pandemic. But again, that was true moment of success for me.
As a working professional and student, I think that there are definitely some tips and tricks
that I would suggest to current students, new students, or prospective students who are thinking about applying to this program.
The first would be the importance of time management, which is essential to success in whatever graduate program you’re in.
I have become so reliant on Google calendar. It’s kind of crazy to me because I block out times for classes and assignments.
I set reminders for due dates, and I really felt like that extra step really helped me succeed in the program
and made a huge impact into how I organized my week as a full-time professional and a student.
And USC has so many great resources available to you. One of which is the USC library,
which you’re given online access to 24/7. The librarians at USC are also so helpful.
And I know this truthfully ’cause I’ve reached out to them many times for assistance and they too have a lot of patience.
I’d also like to highlight the fact that every time I needed a research article and I couldn’t find it on Google
or any other library resource that I had access to, I have literally always been able to find it
in the USC library, which is crazy to me because it’s free and it’s online
and it’s just always there. So it’s very consistent. And if you’re like me and you love finding few resources,
they also have courses and they have all the course materials for the program that you need available online for the most part.
Another great resource that I’ve used is the USC Career Center,
where they have helped me so much in terms of squishing up my LinkedIn page
and building up a resume so they look both professional and completed.
As I mentioned in the beginning, this was one of the more important aspects of choosing an online MPH program,
since these resources in particular have made me feel super comfortable as an online student.
My last tidbit of advice would be to ask for help if you need it. All the professors in the program
have been so kind and understanding and really personable. So I highly recommend reaching out to them
if you need any kind of support. I would also advise two things to help make your way through the program easier,
which is to network with your classmates. Because as I mentioned, my own experience has led me to my current profession.
That would not be possible had I not networked with my classmates and built that support system earlier on.
On the bottom right you’ll see a picture I took of the orientation cards during my first week into the program.
I thought it would be just kind of great to reflect on how great those tips were. I really took them to heart
and they ended up benefiting me in the long run.
Lastly, I’m currently aspiring to pursue my PhD in EPI. So I’m meeting into the application process
and I aim to continue working in the realm of psychiatric EPI,
specifically looking at different pathologies, psychopathologies in particular, such as PTSD,
suicides, substance abuse and depression. Below is a quote that I really think
encompasses what research is to me today. It is a Greek proverb that states,
a society grows great when old men plant trees who shade they know they shall never sit in.
I say that this reminds me of being in research because oftentimes the work seems very academic
and seems very personally impactful, but as time goes on, more research is conducted and you end up seeing
real, true research discoveries coming from your own, and that serves to work and benefit the larger population.
So truly the research that you may be working on will inspire future investigators and researchers, and it just may be the beginning of
an incredible discovery. In closing, I’d like to thank you all
for attending this presentation. And I invite you all to connect with me via LinkedIn, Twitter or email.
I am available to answer any additional questions you may have about my experiences in the program or as a professional post-graduation.
And I will now hand the reins over to Phil to moderate the Q&A.
– [Phil] Thank you, Doctor Kumar, Andrew, and Vijaya for sharing all that great information on the program and your experiences.
You both seem to have take advantage of the opportunity, you know, USC provides with all the networking and resources,
and I’m so happy that you shared that
as you both know, you know, prior to, while applying there is always some hesitation,
but I, you really, thank you for just reinforcing that. So next, I really wanted to just take some time
to go over any questions that anyone might have. We did receive a few already.
So if you have any questions, please be sure to share them in your, in our Q&A box. So I can make sure that we are able to address those
and we’ll get to as many as we can. So, we have one first here
and it could either be for Vijaya or Andrew,
but after taking concentration courses and being exposed to many issues,
what is it easy to come with, come up with a capstone project topic?
– [Vijaya] I can take that question. Actually I think as a biostats EPI concentration student,
for me in particular, it was not as easy to come up with a capstone project. However, I did take the advice of linking my practicum
and capstone together. So for my practicum, I worked on the beginnings of the systematic review,
examining predispositions to family suicide, including like genetic predispositions
amongst other factors. And I then took that into my capstone and I did an entire paper kind of, you know,
summarizing the literature, the current literature on that topic. But I used my practicum to essentially set that up
and I worked on different projects during my practicum in addition to that.
– [Phil] Thank you, Vijaya. We do have another question here.
And it’s this common question, you know, from a lot of our students, you guys are working full-time,
so they wanna know, you know, what the workload is like. I mean, how many hours per day or per week,
or perhaps that you’re spending in classes and how did you handle all of that time management?
– [Andrew] I can kick off and Vijaya probably handled it better than I did and more efficiently, but being a full-time student in this program means
taking eight credits per semester, which is typically two, four credit classes at a time.
And how those classes kind of look and what their requirements are outside of class vary quite differently
depending on the nature of the course. So a lot of the classes that I took as a global health concentration person
were very heavy on essay writing and reading a lot of papers and that kind of thing.
And so there were a lot fewer assignments that were worth a lot more and farther spaced out in the semester.
I only took a couple classes, so correct me if I’m wrong on how the rest of the biostats EPI concentration goes,
but I would think that that one probably had more frequent assignments and probably required
a little bit more consistent production of something that was being graded, if that makes sense.
But the workload is moderate, I would say. So it is rigorous academic program.
You do effort to learn this material and to pass these courses, but it is doable.
Both of us were working full-time while we were in the program. And you just have to find ways to make sure that
you are keeping yourself healthy and doing, approaching it, what is a two-year program
in a sustainable way. So it’s really easy to get burnt out if you try too hard essentially,
and try to be a perfectionist, which is tempting, but it’s important to figure out
what it is that you need to learn and to what degree you need to master that topic. And that will really help you
as you’re preparing for, studying for an exam or writing a paper and those kinds of things.
So for me, I was always able to keep up with the workload, even as I worked in two different jobs
during my time in this program. And it’s absolutely absolutely something that you can do
with a full-time job, especially if you use a lot of the resources that we both talked about.
Reach out to your professors, reach out to your peers and don’t be alone in this.
– [Vijaya] I agree with everything Andrew said, and just to add on as a biostats EPI student,
Google calendar was my friend, and I’ll continue to say that because I was very strict with timing out my work hours
and the hours I had to study. And I knew that working ahead of certain assignments
would benefit me in the long run in terms of workload. A lot of the courses kind of are assignment heavy
because they’re really wants you to like master statistical software and learn these concepts.
And they’re actually things that you use outside of the program. So I did a lot of the work ahead of time.
I was not a procrastinator, which used to be my way to go. And I, you know,
learn how to manage my time better. I would say, as a working student as well, is also important to set aside time for yourself.
And I even use Google calendar for that, to be honest. Just because I wanted to make sure that I was getting the right balance in what I was doing.
And I was able to also perform well in all of my courses just by keeping that balance, so.
– [Phil] Fantastic, thank you Andrew, and thank you Vijaya. I have another good question here is another common question from our students.
What are the, you know, live sessions like? What is the interaction with faculty?
So the question is, do professors respond quickly? And is there enough time to ask questions
during live sessions with all of the other students?
– [Andrew] Live sessions vary quite significantly based again on kind of the nature of the course and how that material should be appropriately taught.
So some of the courses I’ve been in have been very conversational and nobody shares the screen the entire time.
Other courses I’ve been in have had us doing math the entire time, and I’m a little bit more structured,
but all of the professors across every discipline that I’ve taken the course in have been incredibly supportive of students
and are taking the time to kind of pause the lecture and make sure that everyone’s caught up with what we’re talking about.
So, definitely there’s time to ask questions in live sessions. You can ask them in the chat and oftentimes
maybe even another student will answer them. And it’s a good opportunity for that student to learn and practice.
And then also many of our courses have office hours or TA hours or both.
So that was really effective for me when I took biostats was to go to those TA hours
and be able to talk through in kind of a less formal setting, how to master some of those higher level concepts
and work through some of those practice problems.
– [Phil] Thank you Andrew. I think we have time for one more question. We have a one here for the both of you,
it’s just for Andrew and Vijaya. Relative to being a high performing MPH student,
what valuable skills, habits, or practices do you wish you had discovered sooner
in your graduate experience?
– [Vijaya] I would definitely say like a mantra that I kept repeating to myself is work smarter and not harder.
And again, this relates back to procrastination. A lot of times I felt like in my undergrad,
I was procrastinator and I felt like I could have done better on certain things, but in this program as a graduate student,
I really took time management to heart. I think that’s like the key to being a successful graduate student
and a high-performing one at that. I definitely think also reaching out to the professor
if you study on your own and you are unable to like really grasp the concepts.
I think all the professors that I’ve encountered in this program are genuinely so nice and they all respond to,
you know, students within 24 hours. They’ve been willing to be accommodating on certain things depending on your circumstance,
but, you know, I’ve been working on professional full-time. They were completely approachable.
I also think that students themselves like forming that support network early on
is really crucial because I studied with people in the program and I know as biostats EPI,
it really, really did benefit me in the long run. And like I mentioned, I’m still very close with, you know,
a lot of the people in the program that I studied with. So, that’s what I essentially took away.
– [Andrew] I completely agree with that. It’s all about time management there’s a lot of tools out there. So talk to other peers,
professors to figure out what works for them, especially if you’re in a new discipline and maybe there’s a tool that is effective there
that you haven’t been exposed to in a previous course. But completely agree with everything that was said.
– [Phil] Perfect, thank you Andrew, and thank you Vijaya. But yeah, it looks like we’re all,
we’re almost out of time. So if we didn’t get to your specific question, we’ll be sure to reach out to you on a one-on-one situation
and we’ll be sure to answer any questions you might have. So at this time, I would really just like to say thank you to Doctor Kumar,
thank you Vijaya and Andrew for sharing your experiences. It really does mean a lot to us.
Lastly, we’d like to thank you all again for taking time out of your day to hear more about USC and our students’ experiences.
As a reminder for next steps, here’s my contact information with my email address included.
If you have any other questions or if there were any that we did not get to today, we’ll be sure to send you a quick follow-up email
to get these answered. Thank you all so much. And again, just a reminder,
a copy of this recording and slide presentation will be available in the next following days.
Again, thank you for joining us. We hope everyone has a good evening. Be safe and have a great rest of the week.
