Why Earn a Public Health Degree? Public health is an exciting and growing field of study. The field challenges its professionals to address complex health issues, such as improving access to health care, controlling infectious disease, and reducing environmental hazards, reducing violence, reducing substance abuse, and injury reduction. Public health is a diverse and dynamic field. Public Health professionals come from varying educational backgrounds and can specialize in an array of fields. A host of specialists, including teachers, journalists, researchers, administrators, environmentalists, demographers, social workers, laboratory scientists, and attorneys, work to protect the health of the public. Public health is a field geared toward serving others. Public health professionals serve local, national, and international communities. They are leaders who meet the many exciting challenges in assuring  the public's health today and in the future.

The MPH is a professional degree. It is designed to prepare professionals for the "real world" of safeguarding and improving the public's health. Specifically, the MPH will provide you with skills to:

• understand and utilize the factors which influence local, national and global legislative and social policies;
• apply state-of-the-art analytical (both quantitative and qualitative) techniques needed for problem solving;
• develop multidisciplinary and collaborative strategies for solving health-related problems;
• approach health as a population-based concern as well as an individual one;
• develop and implement health programs in limited resource settings that are tailored to the specific needs of the community and in partnership with that community;
• travel or experience health from an international perspective;
• advocate for change in your community on a policy level;
• communicate more effectively with diverse populations; and,
• be positioned for leadership.

• An innovative mission and a curriculum designed to impart practical skills and competencies as well as theoretical knowledge will ensure the applicability of your learning to your goals.
• World-class faculty from the Colleges of Medicine, Education, Nursing, Arts & Sciences, Business, Law and other disciplines across both an academic health center and a major urban research university, including the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, will be your instructors and mentors. The University of Cincinnati is a top 25 public research university.
• Relationships with strong, academically-oriented public health departments and community health agencies serving the approximately 2.5 million people of southwest Ohio, southeast Indiana and northern Kentucky ensure a "real-world" orientation to your studies.
• Connections with Greater Cincinnati-area federal government resources such as CDC/NIOSH and EPA Breitenbach Research Labs, and private-sector resources such as Proctor & Gamble, the world's largest consumer-goods health and wellness company, ensure a breadth of student practicum placements and capstone opportunities.
• A new and developing program means smaller class sizes and a creative, problem-solving approach to student questions and problems – "let's find a way to make this happen" rather than "we've never done things that way."
• A late afternoon / early evening course schedule which accommodates students with daytime responsibilities and allows for either full-time or part-time study.