While public health professionals stood front and center during the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiology is just one of many fields within public health.
Some of these public health fields require more help in the workforce, so to showcase these various fields, the College of Public Health offers multiple minors that touch upon different sectors within public health.
The college offers minors in the following studies: Public Health, Health Services Administration, Health and Technologies and Informatics and Environmental Health Sciences for Natural and Non-Natural Science Majors. Within the past year, the Health and Technologies and Informatics minor was created, and the Environmental Health Sciences Minors were split into two separate tracks.
Melissa Zullo, the associate dean of academic and faculty affairs at the College of Public Health and a professor of epidemiology, said the purpose of the minors is to spark students’ interest in public health.
“Public health is so broad; it touches almost everything that you can think of,” Zullo said. “These minors give students the ability to get a sampling of courses that can either help them to decide on a career path that might be in public health, or it can help introduce them to what it might be like to get a degree in public health.”
Zullo also said each minor provides basic foundational knowledge of public health before focusing on the specific area of study. She added this broad knowledge of public health could help students stand out within a crowded field of job applicants.
“A student who’s in psychology or sociology, for example, might be interested in working in the mental health field,” Zullo said. “A public health minor can provide that student the training to be a program manager in a mental health field or a health educator working in mental health.”
Matthew Stefanak, a public health ambassador for the college, helped develop the environmental health sciences minors. In agreement with Zullo, he said the minors help students with majors such as biology to become prime candidates for employment in public health agencies.
“When they take those courses in the minor, they’re getting the exposure to the core disciplines of public health, which are epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, social and behavioral sciences and management,” Stefanak said.
The environmental health minors also allow students to study the key aspects of environmental health practice, which are food protection, water and wastewater control and solid and hazardous waste management according to Stefanak. From his experience, he believes those are the most important for starting a career in environmental health.
“Somebody who’s going to start a job in environmental health out of college is going to be working in one of those three areas,” he said.
Job prospects in environmental health are abundant upon graduation, such as working for health departments and starting out as a registered environmental health specialist, Stefanak said. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the workforce will grow by 6% until 2032, with an average of nearly 7,000 job openings per year until then.
Regarding interests and careers that the other minors pair well with, Zullo said students looking to work in a hospital setting, managing a department or running programs may be interested in the Health Services Administration minor. She added the Health and Technologies and Informatics minor works well with students interested in building and managing health system data and medical records.
These careers are also some of the fastest growing in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Careers such as a data scientist, epidemiologist and medical and health services manager all involve a background in public health.
“It’s an area that we need to work on strengthening as we move forward so that our healthcare system and our public health system are strong, as they can be to be prepared for the next pandemic or to strengthen our older adults’ longevity,” Zullo said.
Most of these minor programs are just now getting off the ground, so student enrollment is considered low with 64 total students across all of the minor paths.
To incentivize students to consider environmental health and public health as a whole, scholarship opportunities are being created to meet this need in the workforce. The scholarship is called the “Environmental Health Pathways Fund,” which was posted to Scholarship Universe March 15.
John Engoglia is a reporter. Contact him at [email protected].
