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/DarkCaprious Feb 05 '20

Hi! I graduated with my MPH with a focus in Epidemiology and Biostatistics this past May. However, I have been struggling to land a job. I have had quite a number of phone screens, but they usually end in a rejection, or I simply do not hear from them. There are phone screens that I felt I have done well on, but those unfortunately also end in rejections. One question that pops up is how I validate my data.

I answer that when I first validate my data, I do a contents check to ensure that data are in the form that they are supposed to be in (e.g. numeric variables are numeric and character variables are character). I also ensure that the values of the variables are within range and that there are no erroneous values (such as values outside of the inclusion criteria). For character variable values, I ensure that entries follow a uniform format (e.g. NA and nA would stand for the same value, but SAS would recognize these two values as different because they are capitalized differently). Whenever I perform computations in a statistical software, I also do hand calculations for a small subset of data to ensure that numbers are adding up.

Is that an acceptable answer? Other questions are usually behavioral questions, and I feel I do okay on those. I am starting to lose hope because I am not provided feedback regarding why I am rejected, and I'm usually just "ghosted".

Does anyone have any advice as to how to overcome this hurdle? What strategies have you used to ace phone interviews? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!