MPH with a BA? Advice!

[perplexedd]

Long story short: I graduated with a degree in history and thought I wanted to go into international relations or public policy. However, I have become increasingly interested in public health, particularly international  health and urban health after living abroad and being surrounded by the medical field in my career thus far.

 

I have a biology class, a statistics class, and some social science classes on my transcript, though I'm obviously lacking many courses!

 

Am I reaching too far here? Is it feasible to do this without a BS? I plan on taking a biostatistics class through the university I work for, but beyond that-I'm at a loss. My stats are found below. Any help or advice is appreciated! Finally, are there any programs for students coming from a wide variety of backgrounds?

 

Here are my stats:

University: private university in the N.E, history (thesis on a topic in the history of medicine!)

GRE: Quant: 160, Verb: 162, Writing: 5.0

GPA: 3.83/4.0

Related Work Experience:  National Institutes of Health (research assistant in high school, administrative position in college), Fulbright Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University (one year working in the history of medicine, new position in administration and program development, not a research position.

 

Thank you!

[juilletmercredi]

Of course.  I would wager that most public health students are actually social scientists.

 

There's a whole field called history of public health, so if you still want to do history work, there's that.

 

If you are just interested in urban/international health but not necessarily history, it is very possible to do that even without any biological sciences coursework.  I have a PhD in public health and I have one biology course from undergrad (required science credit).

 

My prior PhD program might actually be pretty perfect for you.  I will PM you.  Otherwise look into public health programs in the social and behavioral sciences.  All of the top schools of public health have them - Yale, Emory (behavioral sciences & health education), Columbia (sociomedical sciences), Harvard (global health and population or social and behavioral sciences), Minnesota (community health promotion), Michigan (health behavior and health education), Berkeley (health and social behavior), UCLA (community health sciences), JHU (health, behavior, and society; or international health; or mental health; or population, family, and reproductive health depending on your interests), Tulane (global community health and behavioral sciences), UNC (health behavior), etc.  Brown just started a brand new one that might appeal to you (Behavioral and Social Health Sciences).

[perplexedd]

Thank you for all these suggestions and advice. I'm looking forward to researching each of these programs in more depth.