r/publichealth • u/SadBreath PhD/MPH • Aug 28 '19

ADVICE School and Jobs Advice Megathread Part III

All job and school-related advice should be asked in here. Below is the r/publichealth MPH guide which may answer general questions.

See the below guides for more information:

  1. MPH Guide
  2. Job Guide
  3. Choosing a public health field
  4. Choosing a public health concentration
  5. Choosing a public health industry

Past Threads:

  1. Megathread Part I
  2. Megathread Part II
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u/VexedCoffee Nov 04 '19

Hi all I'm an Episcopal priest who works full time in pastoral ministry and am not looking to change fields. However, I do consider myself to be a life long student and one of the advantages of my profession is an expectation to continually be studying and the flexibility to be able to enter a local part-time program.

The reason I'm drawn to a program centered around healthcare is that as a priest I'm, unsurprisingly, often interfacing with healthcare in hospital, nursing home, and hospice visits and many of the struggles that my parishioners bring to me are related to issues of health, acute and chronic. I'm fascinated by the interface of health and faith, both in terms of addressing spiritual health through rites, liturgies, and counsel as well as the ways that faith communities effect health (such as Adventists, or Blue Zones). I'm also interested in bioethics, the philosophy of medicine, and the history of healthcare.

So, would an MPH program be the appropriate avenue for me to do further scholarships in these areas? Because of the breadth of the field its difficult for me to assess from the outside if an MPH program is going to be too focused on the vocational training of PH professionals to be applicable to someone not looking to change careers or if I'll be able to pursue the research relevant to my interests.

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u/daikaku Dec 01 '19

If you aren't looking to get a degree (which is so expensive if you aren't looking to change fields) you may just want to look into sociology/biology/epidemiology etc courses at your local community college and/or get an associates degree. Or, if you need prereqs, you can get those accredited at a CC and go to a 4 year university for the more specialized courses.

You'll still get the relevant knowledge but you won't have to pay nearly as much and you'll have more flexibility in choosing classes that appeal to you.

That said, I don't know what kind of course selection the colleges near you have.