Are you considering a career in public health? If you’re looking to work as an epidemiologist, biostatistician, nutritionist, healthcare administrator, or any of the many roles within the vast and varied field of public health, applying to public health school is likely in your future.
You can earn various degrees in public health school, but the most common, and the most widely recognized, is the Masters of Public Health, or the MPH.
To get into a top MPH program, not only will you need strong grades and test scores, you’ll also want to demonstrate experience in the field. That’s why a memorable personal statement that showcases your experiences and conveys your journey through public health will help you stand out from the crowd.
In this guide, we’ll cover the nuts and bolts of how to write a standout personal statement for your MPH application. We’ll help you understand what your personal statement should include and how to tackle the writing process. Plus, we’ll show you a real-life example essay and break down why it works.
Without further ado, let’s get into understanding the MPH personal statement.
Your personal statement is a chance for you to reveal the qualities and experiences that make you a worthy MPH candidate beyond what’s written on your transcripts and test scores. It’s also an opportunity to demonstrate what sets you apart from the rest of the applicant pool. In short, it provides a space in which you can convince public health school admissions committees that they should accept you into their program. As such, it’s one of the most important parts of your MPH application.
We’ll get into the specific points you’ll want to cover in your personal statement in just a bit, but the central mission of your personal statement should be to give admissions committees a clear sense of the following:
An excellent personal statement will link these pieces of information in order to create a cohesive narrative of your path towards the MPH and beyond.
Admissions to MPH programs differ from admissions to some other types of graduate programs in that they often prioritize experience in the field. While great transcripts never hurt (and should certainly still be a focus), the bar for MPH admissions in terms of GPA and test scores is typically not as high as it is in hyper-competitive grad school fields like medical school and law school.
While you’ll still want to earn the strongest grades and test scores you can (usually the GRE, though many schools also accept the LSAT, MCAT, or GMAT), especially if you’re planning to apply to top-tier programs, demonstrating experience in the public health field will be just as important. This might take the form of a few of the following: work experience, volunteer experience, research, other extracurriculars, or related coursework.
In fact, many MPH programs only admit applicants who already have some experience in the field. For example, Johns Hopkins (currently ranked the top public health school by U.S. News) requires MPH applicants to have at least two years of relevant post-baccalaureate work experience, a related doctoral degree, or two years of medical school under their belt. Other public health schools, such as Harvard and Yale, to name a couple, have similar requirements.
Because demonstrating experience is so important to putting together a strong MPH application, your personal statement is a valuable opportunity to highlight your experiences and demonstrate that they make you a great candidate. You’ll want to invest considerable time and attention into this part of your application if you want to stand out.
The majority of public health schools use the centralized SOPHAS application in their admissions processes. In SOPHAS, the personal statement—called the “Statement of Purpose and Objectives”—allows space for 1,500 words.
However, many MPH programs have their own content and length requirements for the personal statement. Check the guidelines for each program to which you’re planning to apply. While this might sound like the beginning of a complicated process, especially if you’re planning to apply widely, a great approach to keeping the writing process simple is to start by creating one basic personal statement that you can later tailor as needed.
Since most programs ask for personal statements that are between 500 and 1,000 words in length—a 500 word maximum is also fairly common—we suggest beginning by aiming for a 500-word basic statement with the understanding that, for some programs, you will have the opportunity to go more in depth.
Before you begin writing your personal statement, you’ll first need to figure out what it is you want to say. As essay prompts are usually fairly broad and open-ended—most can be distilled down to “why do you want to earn an MPH from our program?”—it can be tough for applicants to know where to start.
Remember that your public health experiences will be the cornerstone of your personal statement. As such, you’ll want to keep an up-to-date CV handy as you’re brainstorming essay ideas.
To start the brainstorming process, grab a notepad and a pen and answer the following questions. Feel free to jot down anything and everything that comes to mind.
A strong public health school personal statement should not only answer all of the above questions, it should also connect your answers so that they form the backbone of a compelling narrative. Your personal statement should tell the story of what has led you to pursue an MPH and a career in public health.
If you have accomplishments that you’re proud of (such as publications, presentations, fundraisers you’ve put on, or anything else that’s relevant to public health), you may want to think about including these details in your personal statement, too.
Keep in mind that, because public health is a broad field with many sub-specialties, a great personal statement should reflect a relatively narrow focus of interest that’s backed up by your experiences. Simply stating your general passion for public health will come across as vague and unknowledgeable. It won’t help you stand out in a pool of applicants.
The area of interest you write about in your personal statement isn’t binding—admissions committees understand that people’s interests naturally change over time. However, demonstrating a specific focus now shows that your decision to apply for an MPH is thought through and well founded.
An effective personal statement should also be customized to reflect the specific MPH program to which you’re applying. Aside from adjustments in length, most of the tailoring that you’ll do after you write your basic personal statement will be to make it program specific. Ask yourself what values, curricula, faculty, or other resources compel you toward a given program. By including information about how specific elements of a program will help you accomplish your goals, you’ll make the argument that not only is the program a good fit, it’s also an inevitable next step in your trajectory.
For even more advice, head over to our guide to graduate school statements of purpose. This post includes more tips and tricks for effective brainstorming and will also help you learn how to structure an amazing personal statement.
To give you a sense of how different applicants handled their MPH personal statements, below we’ll meet three applicants and learn about what they wrote. Then we’ll read a full-length personal statement from one of these applicants and discuss what we can learn from her example.
This personal statement comes from Megan’s application to Yale’s MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences program:
My fascination with the role of nutrition in healing complex diseases stemmed from helping loved ones during my childhood constructively handle mental health challenges. When I was nine, I lost my father to cancer and watched my mother and brother’s mental health decline over a decade of processing his death. At the time, I didn’t have a strong grasp of how nutrition could’ve helped them in the same way that I do now. I began learning about this topic when I sought out immersion experiences with local organizations in New Zealand (NZ) and Cambodia to pursue my interest in nutrition and explore the benefits of a healthful diet within those communities.
Through a one-month group volunteer expedition in Cambodia, I shared ideas with 15 local families on how improving diet quality could positively affect their overall health. They informed us that our culturally sensitive nutrition lessons supported them in eating healthfully, which led to improvements in physical and mental well-being as they faced trauma following their country’s devastating 1979 genocide. This showed me that mental health benefits can be reaped from diet as the result of both beneficial nutrient properties and the establishment of community through uniting people around food. Upon my return home, I applied my newfound appreciation for socialization while sharing healthful meals with my family in NZ, which reinforced our sense of togetherness. As my belief in the power of nutrition for stabilizing mental health was strengthened, I became determined to bolster my knowledge of diet as a psychiatric therapy.
To continue empowering individuals facing psychological trauma to choose healthful diets in another context, I decided to visit the United States, a country known for its societal diversity. I received a merit-based scholarship from my home institution to study abroad at Cornell University. To facilitate my exploration of nutrition’s role in psychiatry within the United States’ diverse populations and to improve my nutrition counseling skills, I continued my studies at Cornell in the Didactic Program in Dietetics.
While at Cornell, I realized that the purpose of nutrition care for mental health lies not only in facilitating more positive emotions psychologically but also in restoring nutritional balance physiologically. I’ve also learned that many populations of low socioeconomic status who consume low-quality diets, due to complex social reasons sometimes beyond their control, also face mental illness in conjunction with their health disparities. To better understand mental illnesses associated with racial inequities, I volunteered as a nutrition educator at AltaMed’s 10-week obesity program to provide nutrition care for a Hispanic group. Through co-taught nutrition lessons, I built rapport with parents who spoke little English and their children by tailoring teaching plans and using hands-on exercises. I also used nutrition counseling with individuals experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and autism spectrum disorder to reinforce how they could use diet to positively influence their behavioral and brain health, both mentally and neurologically.
My experiences with diverse communities internationally and in the U.S. have strengthened in me the importance of making nutrition care for mental health available to all. They have also inspired me to deepen my understanding of how diet can be used to improve behavioral, mental, and neurological health for various populations, regardless of one’s mental state, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity. These are some of the reasons why I want to attend Yale University’s niche Master of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences.
The evolution of my interest in understanding and advocating for nutrition’s role in brain health was further strengthened this past summer. I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my boyfriend when he walked out and told me he was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), a debilitating neurological disease. Although this news was challenging to grasp, I felt hopeful that helping my family through a similar challenge previously, along with the knowledge gained from my current research writing, would prove valuable here.
Coincidentally, eight months prior, I co-founded a collaborative article-writing project to showcase nutrition’s profound role in brain and behavioral health with my former professor, a Cornell mitochondria and nutrition researcher. In this project, “Eating for Happiness,” I review evidence on dietary mechanisms that contribute to the development of neurological and mental illnesses as well as previous interventions aimed at targeting these mechanisms. Subsequently, I use these findings to recommend new population-level interventions that could reduce mental illness mortality rates, such as conducting nutrition lessons at psychiatric treatment centers. In one specific article I co-authored with a dietitian, we synthesized over 150 articles on nutrition’s ability to alleviate psychiatric and neurological disorders, including depression and Alzheimer’s. This article has been accepted for publication by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Behavioral Health Group.
My desire to continue promoting the connection between nutrition and neurological health expanded when I learned that my co-founder of “Eating for Happiness” is also a researcher for Cornell’s federally-funded ME research center. The serendipity of working with an expert on this currently incurable disease while living with my partner who has ME has inspired me to approach ME treatment with a nutrition component. For my next article, I plan to promote nutrition interventions as a powerful adjunct to treat behavioral health issues by linking diet to ME.
Studying and working abroad to provide evidence-based dietary recommendations have resulted in my desire to drive a paradigm shift in our global perception of nutrition as important for both brain and body health. Nutrition produces not only psychological benefits that improve mental health, but also dramatic biological changes that support brain function. As Yale’s MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences addresses nutrition as a health promoting behavior that comes with psychosocial challenges faced by many communities worldwide, I am pursuing this program to become a well-rounded public health behavioral science and nutrition professional. It is the ideal program for me to further explore how powerfully diet can impact behavioral health and to apply my knowledge in practice settings, especially through collaboration with Community Alliance for Research & Engagement within Yale’s unique Public Health practicum course.
After the MPH, I plan to integrate my nutrition counseling skills and nutritional psychiatry research to work with other healthcare professionals as a public health dietitian and behavioral science professional, while continuing advocacy work around ME. I hope to improve nutrition access for all who seek holistic care, especially those who struggle with mental illness, as dietary treatment should be a human right. Ultimately, Yale’s MPH would allow me to combine the science of nutrition and mental health with the art of compassion to promote nutrition as a therapy to all.
Clocking in at around 1,000 words, Megan’s personal statement is on the longer side. While some applications might call for a more succinct approach, the fact that Yale permits a longer essay gives her plenty of room to go into detail regarding her experiences in public health and her career goals as a dietitian and behavioral science professional.
What’s working here?
While great grades and test scores are the foundation of any graduate school application, for the best chances of admission to your dream MPH program, experience in the public health field is also a must. The personal statement is a space in which you can highlight the value of your experiences and connect them to your passions and career ambitions. A strong personal statement will go a long way toward convincing admissions committees that you’d be an ideal student for their program and an impressive addition to the public health field.
