Epi career options question

[balmofgilead]

I'm trying to find a career path. I've always had a fondness for epidemiology, but my perception has been that a lot of the career options involve running studies. In college I was a research assistant for an MPH person who was doing data stuff (collection, analysis) for some studies, and while I think it's super-awesome that data is collected and

Comments

[erikalindsay]

Have you checked out the MPH board on studentdoctor.net? It might be of some help to you. There are lots of different career paths you could take with an MPH. You don't need to focus on epi. I have an MPH in maternal and child health (I am now getting a PhD in epi, though), there are also environmental health programs, community health education, nutrition, etc. Health departments might offer the most stable employment opportunity, but there is a lot of work done in non-profits, too.

If you don't think delayed gratification would work for you, public health might not be for you. Most interventions fail, research itself takes forever, and health departments move at glacial paces for any project that isn't an outbreak investigation.

[brbrbrad]

My MPH was not in epi, it was in global health, but I have been working in a quasi-epidemiology role at a local health department in a medium-size county (210,000 residents) for almost 3 years. My job title is Health Data Analyst and it's my duty to stay on top of health trends in our county and the state as a whole, keep the health director informed of emerging trends, look up data for grants and presentations, and communicate data in easy-to-understand ways such as maps, tables, charts, and graphs. For the most part I don't collect much data, except for occasional patient or community surveys