Online MPH Student Spotlight | Andrew Blank & Vijaya Seegulam

Phil Solaria:
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 Solaria. 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 and A box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and hit send.

Phil Solaria:
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 Dr. Shubha Kumar, PhD, MPH to touch on her experience and work within the program. Good afternoon, Dr. Kumar.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
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.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
And I did my MPH in health services and my PhD in the same area. And prior to academia, I was really involved in 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. 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 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.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
But our department is very huge. We are essentially the size of the School of Public Health with over a 100 faculty doing research in all kinds of areas within public health. And we are organized into six divisions. So disease prevention, global health, bio informatics, 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.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
So the program itself, I’m sure you all have heard a little bit about it. But it’s essentially 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 GIS field and public health. So kind of understanding how place and location affects health and health outcomes.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
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 kind of pick and choose their concentrations in public health and what courses they would like to pursue.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
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 want to 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.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
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 small NGO in Rural Uganda all the way to the World Health Organization, to LA County Department of Public Health, various organizations depending on the student’s interests. You’re going to hear a little bit more about how our two graduates did and what they did for their practicum as we go through next. So quickly, I would like to just give you a little bit of background about our graduate presenters today. First I’d like to introduce Andrew Blank. He is a recent graduate with a concentration in Global Health.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
Andrew is amazing. He not only was a student doing the program, but obviously he was also active service and amazingly doing work of that kind, also doing the 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.

Dr. Shubha Kumar:
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 a 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 Blank:
Thank you so much Dr. Kumar, and thank you everyone for being here tonight. I think this is a really awesome investment of your time to learn about 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 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 want to 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 Dr. Kumar said, I got my start at the US Naval Academy. It’s a four year undergraduate school in Annapolis, Maryland.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 100s if not 1000s of bombs into those countries. So, that was my job and that was something that was very technically challenging.

Andrew Blank:
And like I said, it was a privilege to be able to serve with incredible people. I’m really grateful for that experience 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 more 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.

Andrew Blank:
And for me personally, those ideas stem largely from my faith. So I happened to be as 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 a Tomahawk Missile.

Andrew Blank:
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 Koran, you’ll see that it says, “To do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, those need, neighbors who are near, neighbors who are strangers, the companion by your side, the wayfarer ye meet and what your right hands possess.” In Leviticus in the Torah it says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Dr. Martin Luther king, Jr in the letter from Birmingham jail, “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 of loving our neighbor.

Andrew Blank:
And so looking to love our neighbor 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 learn 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 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.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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 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 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 that is being applied to people who are living in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Andrew Blank:
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 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 that 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 and 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 Dr. Kumar talked about, there’s also an opportunity to do a practicum.

Andrew Blank:
So 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. It’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 wellbeing of the refugee population in San Diego County. Dr. Kumar also mentioned the affiliation agreement that’s required for a practicum which USC had not previously had an affiliation agreement with this particular program, but that paperwork went through very quickly.

Andrew Blank:
The office is very efficient at processing that, so don’t let that be a perceived barrier to you and finding something meaningful in the place that you live. When I first got involved with the Refugee Health Unit, it was January 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 Wellbeing for Young Men.

Andrew Blank:
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 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 just prior to COVID-19 the Refugee Health Unit had stood up the San Diego refugee Communities Coalition.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
So community health workers are people who are from within particularly vulnerable or disenfranchised or marginalized communities, such as refugees and 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.

Andrew Blank:
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. 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.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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’re kind of clear-eyed about the situation that will be awaiting you when you apply to jobs and public health. It’s an incredibly important, meaningful time to be in this field as a result of that, there are a lot of people applying for these jobs.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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 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 they expand into an 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 a Google Forms would. So I recommend using that if you want to kind of dig into deeper analysis with your surveys. The Community ToolBox is a great source for any sort of community organizing you’re trying to do.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
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 Seegulam:
Thanks, Andrew, great presentation, and it’s tough act to follow, but I’ll try my best. Hi everyone, my name is 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 going to 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 physician to patient soft skills.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 while 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 our larger scales. So in my search for MPH programs, I happened to come across USC’s program.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 used to guide me in my decision making process.

Vijaya Seegulam:
So first I wanted to be able to work while earning my degree because I was 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 have.

Vijaya Seegulam:
On this slide you’ll see pictures I took on weekends while at the library, studying here in Florida. On the left is a picture of the trademark software to ULA 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. In the program, my concentration was 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
And I felt like this was accomplished through mastery of a following statistical softwares, SPSS, 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 gain 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 Dr. 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 bench representing USC at the International Global Health Case Competition at the Emory University in 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 I 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
Here’s a photo of her board this past year where Andrew was our President and 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
Speaking of great friends as an honor 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 slide, 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, R01s and P50s. I developed a motto for myself, which is, “On time, on budget and within scope,” which kind of encompasses my duties at the BU. On the right you’ll see a picture of kind of going through what a project lifecycle looks like and what I oversee are some of the steps of project management.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 coauthor 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 Dr. Fauci and other renown epidemiologists in the field. I will be honest with you guys as a fan-girl just seeing my name kind of in the same article as Dr. Fauci, who is 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.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 organize my week as a full-time professional and as a student. At USC you have so many great resources available to you, one of which is the USC library which you’re given online access to 24/7. And the librarians at USC are also so helpful. And I noticed personally because I’ve reached out to them many times for assistance and they too have a lot of patience.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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 resources, they also have classrooms 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 my resume so they look both professional and completed.

Vijaya Seegulam:
As I mentioned in the beginning, this was one of the more important aspects of choosing an Online MPH Program. So 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 and 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 on one of the orientation slides during my first week into the program. I thought it would be just kind of great to reflect on how great those tips were as I really took them to heart and they ended up benefiting me in the long run.

Vijaya Seegulam:
Lastly, I’m currently aspiring to pursue my PhD in Epi. So I’m knee deep 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 whose 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 feels very personally impactful, but as time goes on, more research is conducted and you end up seeing real true research discoveries stemming from your own, and that serves to work and benefit the larger population.

Vijaya Seegulam:
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. I’d 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 and A.

Phil Solaria:
Thank you, Dr. Kumar, Andrew, and Vijaya for sharing all that great information on the program and your experiences. You both seem to have taken advantage of the opportunity USC provides with all the networking and resources, and I’m so happy that you shared that. As you both know while applying there is always some hesitation but 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 our Q and 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 up with a Capstone project topic?

Vijaya Seegulam:
I can take that question actually. I think as a Biostats Epi concentration students 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 familial suicide, including genetic predispositions amongst other factors. And I then took that into my Capstone and I did an entire paper kind of summarizing 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 Solaria:
Thank you, Vijaya. We do have another question here and it’s just common question, you know from a lot of our students. You guys are working full time, so they want to 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 Blank:
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.

Andrew Blank:
But the workload is moderate, I would say. So it is a 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 approaching 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.

Andrew Blank:
And it’s 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 Seegulam:
I agree with everything Andrew said, and just to add on as a Biostat 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 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 learned how to manage my time better. I would say, as a working student, as well it’s 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.

Phil Solaria:
Fantastic. Thank you, Andrew and thank you, Vijaya. I have another good question. Here is another common question from our students. What are the 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 Blank:
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 a 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 of 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.

Andrew Blank:
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 Solaria:
Thank you, Andrew. I think we have time for one more question. We have 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 Seegulam:
I would definitely say 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 a 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 aren’t enabled to 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 students within 24 hours. They’ve been willing to be accommodating on certain things depending on your circumstance, but I’ve been working professional full time. They were completely approachable.

Vijaya Seegulam:
I also think that students themselves 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 a lot of the people in the program that I studied with. So that’s what I essentially took away.

Andrew Blank:
I totally 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 Solaria:
Perfect. Thank you, Andrew. And thank you, Vijaya. But it looks like 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 that you might have. So at this time, I would really just like to say thank you to Dr. 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.

Phil Solaria:
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.