Sunday, March 25, 2012

Understanding A Master of Public Health


Are you interested in earning a public health graduate degree but not sure which one to take? A number of different programs can be considered by individuals who want to take up a public health masters programs. Below are the similarities and differences of master of public health versus MS in public health.

For people who are interested in learning about the basic concepts in public health, they should consider engaging in a Master of Public Health. Public health is an industry that can be delved into by people who are able to graduate from MPH programs as these focus mainly on this industry. Depending on what you like, there are different focuses that you can delve into here from health policy and administration to environmental health.

In public health, accomplishing an MPH program will require students to take up various courses in all major areas. When it comes to this, all MPH students have to engage in either an internship program, a thesis, or a comprehensive test. Something like a Master of Public Health is actually awarded by the Graduate School of Public Health to students who complete the program.

This is the kind of program that will normally accept you regardless of your undergraduate course. What you have here are masteral courses that are ideal for undergraduates. For some schools, a doctorate degree is required before you get considered for an MPH degree.

Admission procedures and rates are not standard across all educational facilities. Some schools have an acceptance rate of eighty percent. An aspiring student should obtain at least a 50th-percentile on every GRE section and an undergraduate GPA of at least 3.0.

A Master of Public Health degree usually takes two years for full-time study. If you are a working professional armed with a PhD, you can engage in an accelerated program that lasts for 12 months. When it comes to post graduate degrees, not all of these can be shouldered through scholarships and the like.

For those who want to delve into professional research efforts, a master's of science in forms such as MS, MSc, ScM, or MSPH is available. You will be trained internally and externally when it comes to this regardless of the discipline that you select early on. The Master of Science in Public Health is the exception because it is still an academic research degree but include some of the PH courses from the MPH.

If you want to be a professional in the public health industry, the Master of Science is really not a good degree to consider. What is tremendously important when it comes to a profession like this is interdisciplinary education. The program normally ends with either a research project or thesis.

Options like academic doctoral programs such as PhD or ScD can be valuable to someone with an MS program in mind as the focus will be somewhat similar. Usual programs take two years for coursework and dissertation/thesis. For a masters of science degree, it is the School of Art and Sciences that grants the credentials to graduates.

The thing about these courses is that both of them are relevant but MS programs are simply more intense than Master of Public Health programs and the acceptance rate for the former is smaller as well. Even if this is so, variations in admission rates exist. Although it rarely happens, there is still the possibility of an MS student to get something like a training grant from the company that he or she is working for.