I graduated from GT with highest honors in May 2014. I graduated from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University with an MPH in Epidemiology in May 2016. In my first year at Emory, I volunteered for the Georgia Department of Public Health – specifically, the Ebola Traveler Enrollment and Monitoring Program. During the summer of 2015, I completed my public health practicum requirement in Cape Cod, where I working on two different public health projects. In one project, I monitored cyanobacteria blooms in freshwater ponds. In the other project, I worked for the Cape Cod Hoarding Task Force. In April 2016, I submitted my thesis on the comparison of IgG antibody seroprevalence to three pandemic strains of GII.4 norovirus. As of July 2016, I started working for the Acute Disease Epidemiology Section at the Georgia Department of Public Health. More precisely, I am a member of the Zika Team in the Zoonotic and Vectorborne Diseases Division.
I feel I had a really good foundation of knowledge when I started grad school. I am in the minority of people in my program at Emory that has lab experience, which is an advantage for me. My GT classes involving coding also gave me an advantage when I started doing statistical analyses in SAS at Emory.
Work hard, go to class, and ask for help. Your degree is only as valuable as the effort you put into it. Yes, it will be very challenging at times, but the hard work will eventually pay off. Also, don’t set your sights on one career path. I didn’t even know what public health was when I started at GT, and now I can’t imagine pursuing anything but public health.
Make sure you have a club, activity, or hobby to focus on other than academics. School can be incredibly overwhelming, and I think it’s important to have an outlet where you can have fun and not be stressed.
