deciding where to apply



This is essentially the first step before you start doing any kind of networking or application writing. Here is the process that I went through in deciding what schools to apply for (and how I ended up contradicting myself at the end!)

At the beginning of all this, I was DEAD set on coming back to California - sunny, beautiful, WARM California. (Here is a pic of me in my preferred state of weather...) During my master's at Yale, I hated how far away I was from my family and friends in California, and it was WAY too cold in New Haven. So that was where I started in terms of creating my list of schools. I started thinking of big institutions with schools of public health that were in cities I'd want to live in in California, and came up with the following:

  • USC
  • UCLA
  • UCSD/SDSU
  • UCI 
  • UC Berkeley (didn't end up submitting)
  • Claremont Graduate University (DrPH)
  • (Stanford unfortunately could not make the list because they didn't have a program/school related to public health that matched what I was looking for)

So that's five California schools - definitely not enough to make my list long enough for me to be comfortable so I added a few more "west coast" options:
  • Oregon State University
  • Portland University
  • UT Austin (DrPH)
  • University of Arizona (didn't end up submitting)
And then, in October of 2018, I (of course) started dating a boy who was dead set on going to medical school at Yale Med, so I (begrudgingly) added a few Ivy's and east coast schools to my list:
  • Brown
  • Columbia (DrPH)
  • NYU
  • Harvard

To decide which program/department I then applied to within each of schools, I sort of did this in tandem with my next step (identifying potential mentors). I essentially applied to the program/department where I knew I would have a good mentor/advisor that I had connected with, even if that program/department wasn't 100% aligned with my own research field. For example, at UCLA I applied to their Health Policy & Management department, even though I have no experience in that field. But the mentor I identified who did tobacco research at UCLA sat in that department, so applied there (and got in!). Ultimately, this echoes my message that I have throughout this site, which is that mentor fit and connection is the absolute most important aspect of the application process.

So that's how I ended up applying to 12 programs (with a few DrPH mixed in as noted above). I tried to cast a very wide net because my Stanford mentor told me how sometimes this can just be a numbers game, as some programs only take 1 or 2 students per year. I'm also definitely a "better safe than sorry" person too. It's also not that much extra effort to apply to an additional school, because the core part of most applications is done through SOPHAS (like the MPH application process). So do I regret applying to so many programs? Not really because at that time I really felt like I was shooting in the dark, and applying to more programs gave me a little more sense of security that I was increasing my statistical probability of getting in somewhere!

Also a note on the SOPHAS application, *almost* all of the schools use that platform, but not all. So I would double check with each school you are applying to to make sure that you fill out anything that's specific to them and their portal that may be outside of SOPHAS.