What's Next for the Class of 2014

In less than a week, more than 300 Mailman School students will celebrate their academic accomplishments. When the parties conclude and diplomas have been framed on the wall, they will set out on the next phase of their lives as public health leaders. Here, in their own words, seven MPH candidates in the Class of 2014—the first to complete the new Columbia MPH—speak about their career plans.

Ben Spoer, MPH, Population and Family Health
PhD Student in Public Health, New York University

One of the things we’ve been taught to avoid here at Mailman is drive-by public health interventions where you helicopter in and tell people “this is what you need.” Six months later you’re shocked when people are back to their previous health status. That’s a perspective I didn’t have before. Through my experience with Hike the Heights, first as a practicum and now as its co-organizer, I learned what it’s really like to do community organizing. I went into it feeling like this is something I enjoy doing, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get a job out of it. And here I am, going into a PhD program, partly because of my participation in Hike the Heights.

I’m getting a PhD in public health in the Global Institute of Public Health at NYU. I will be specializing in social behavioral sciences and doing a lot of community-based participatory research, concentrating on chronic disease and obesity. I just wrote my thesis on why we need to do more community-based work on childhood obesity. I’ve been thinking about making the positive argument for the strength of communities. We have a lot of research that tells us what happens when communities are broken. But we haven’t seen a lot of arguments on what is good about having an intact community. I never heard of urbanism until I got here. And now urbanism is one of the things I’m looking to research.

Kristina Rosales, Executive MPH General Public Health
Consular Officer, U.S. State Department in Havana, Cuba

I work at the U.S. State Department at the United States Interest Section in Havana, Cuba. I am a consular officer, which means I work in adjudicating immigrant and non-immigrant visas. I've been with the State Department since 2008. I was initially recruited through the Pickering Fellowship program, which prepares future Foreign Service Officers. I've been interested in diplomacy since high school, so the Foreign Service was a natural match. With time, I became more interested in certain aspects of our foreign policy, specifically global health diplomacy, hence why I chose the Mailman School.

I was in the one-year General Public Health Program. My focus was primarily global health and substance abuse. I had the opportunity to do a practicum in Brazil on mental health and substance abuse. My background was in international relations, so public health was quite a change of pace. I learned to analyze issues from a more human-rights-based perspective. Coming from a policy background, I didn’t have the foundation in scientific methods that should be used in the development of policies, so Mailman was quite instrumental. 

Alexandra Caldwell, MPH, Health Policy and Management
Associate Specialist of Strategic Controlling at The Global Fund, Geneva, Switzerland

I work in the Treasury and Finance Department at The Global Fund, a public-private partnership dedicated to attracting and disbursing resources to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Much of what I do deals with measurement. I design performance indicators using financial data and grant data. As an example, to measure HIV treatment coverage, I would work with technical partners like UNAIDS and PEPFAR to get their input and buy-in on how to design the measure. These indicators track how well the Global Fund is doing in order to monitor and improve the organization’s performance.

I was here last year doing similar work as part of my practicum. It was the first time a Columbia student got an internship at the Global Fund, and I was working with a really terrific economist. In the department of Health Policy and Management at Mailman, I had done work in comparative effectiveness research, decision analysis, and STATA (statistical software). These were some of the factors that got me in the door.

Huy Phu Pham, Accelerated MPH, Biostatistics
Assistant Professor of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham

I was a pathology resident at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and I wanted to learn more about clinical research methods. That’s what I enjoyed and why I applied for a one-year Accelerated MPH in Biostatistics at the Mailman School. My time at the School has given me technical skills that have been very useful in the data analysis work I do as a Transfusion Medicine fellow at the New York Blood Center. Before Mailman, I didn’t know how to use SAS statistical software or how to analyze big data. Now, I’ve learned how to read medical literature and understand how the statistical analysis was done. More than that, I can apply this knowledge to my own research.

My time at Mailman exceeded expectations. An unexpected thing happened. I got to know a fellow student in the department of Health Policy and Management and became involved in several cost effectiveness studies. And now this has become one of my main research interests. The work I did at the Mailman School as well as the knowledge I gained during school was instrumental in helping me to get my next job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I will be an Assistant Professor of Pathology starting in July. When I interviewed for the position, my cost effectiveness work attracted interests from various faculty in the department – many thought it is a helpful tool to answer different clinical questions in pathology and laboratory medicine. The lesson is that students who come to Mailman never know what useful skills and interests they might acquire.

Kirstin Heinrich, MPH, Epidemiology
Outcomes Research Analyst, Becton, Dickinson & Company

As my classmates walk across the stage collecting their diplomas at commencement, I will be in Florida at the beginning of a cross-country bike ride to benefit affordable housing initiatives with the non-profit Bike & Build. I will ride from Jacksonville, Florida to Monterey, California with 30 other young adults, raising awareness for affordable housing issues and occasionally trading our bikes for hammers to help build homes. Shortly after we finish our 79-day bike trek across the country, I will be starting as a Health Economics and Outcomes Research Analyst at Becton, Dickinson & Company, a medical technology company.

A unique aspect of Mailman’s program, and ultimately the reason I chose to pursue my MPH here, was the ability to focus my studies in Epidemiology, supplemented with a Certificate in Comparative Effectiveness Outcomes Research from the department of Health Policy and Management. The combination has proved to be as beneficial as I had hoped. I have been able to bridge quantitative methods across departments, particularly merging health economic analysis and decision tools with methods for casual inference from epidemiology. This union will be absolutely necessary in my new position. Furthermore, I will be working closely with a number of functions, from marketing and sales to reimbursement to medical affairs.  The interdisciplinary nature of my education at Mailman, from the ability to study in two departments to the case study-based Integration of Science and Practice course, has given me a firm foundation to combine varying perspectives and priorities.

Olga Gromadzka, MPH, Sociomedical Sciences
Field Supervisor, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

In my new job at the New York City Department of Health, I will be supervising four interviewers who are surveying men who have sex with men as part of a National HIV Behavioral Surveillance study run through the Centers for Disease Control. The survey covers everything from demographics, to sexual behavior, to drug use. This is literally my dream job. It marries the two things that I love: working with research participants and data analysis. I applied back in February and I’ve already started.

Back in high school in Riverhead, Long Island, I volunteered with a group that provided housing for people who were drug users and their children. I became interested social disparities and health disparities. When I moved to New York City, I continued working in research with social organizations and NGOs. Four years ago I joined the HIV center at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and I fell in love with HIV work. I found Mailman School of Public Health because the HIV center is located in the Rosenfield Building. When it was time for me to choose a graduate school, it was clear that Mailman had everything I wanted.

Allison Larr, MPH, Environmental Health Sciences
Analyst, Citigroup

Last year during my practicum at the Clinton Climate Initiative, I worked on a funding opportunity for building an infrastructure for electric vehicles. That’s what got the wheels turning that you need money to make things happen. Later I worked at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection where I evaluated projects for how much they would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also for the payback period—in other words, how long it takes for the city to realize savings from its investment in the project. That cemented for me the importance of finance to infrastructure projects. My thesis was about public finance structures. I focused on revolving funds, which the EPA has used very effectively, particularly with the construction of wastewater treatment plants. Before learning more about this field I hadn’t seriously considered finance. But the more I considered it, the more it seemed perfect for me.

I’m going to be an analyst in the public finance division at Citigroup, which finances infrastructure projects. Infrastructure is central to maintaining a healthy population. If you don’t have a sewer system, public transportation, roads, you won’t have a healthy population. Municipalities or utilities are able to afford these amenities by issuing bonds, and it’s the banker’s job to make sure that process goes smoothly and that the bond is structured in a way that the city is able to make that debt service over time.