Is studying dental hygiene difficult?

Masters in Public Health (MPH): What is is like studying at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine?

• Considering getting my MPH there.  Stories?  advice?  what are you doing now?

• Answer:

  I studied for a Masters in Control of Infectious Diseases at the LSHTM in 2008/2009. The most interesting thing for me, in terms of courses, is that you get to choose almost any of them, and you will end up with a set of knowledge that might be different from everyone else doing the same masters degree. The full-time course runs over 1 year, and it has 3 terms. On the first term almost all courses are mandatory, and include Basic or Advanced Statistics, Epidemiology and Health Economics, depending on which degree you're enrolled on. At this point you can still decide whether you want to enrol in a different degree; you get a chance to look at all the courses you can choose from for the second term, and some are restricted to specific degrees. The second term has all the courses you picked, and you have to complete at least one assignment for each course, most of them as part of a team. For example, you can be part of a team of 6 in the course titled "Design of Health Control Programmes in Developing Countries" - the name says it all, the teams have to design a health control programme for a specific disease/set of diseases in a specific area/country, write it down in a formal document and then present it to the rest of the class. At the end of the second term there is a study period followed by exams. There are 2 exams for every student attending the school: the first exam includes all the subjects possibly studied during the first term, the second exam includes all the subjects you could possibly pick during the second term (according to which masters degree you're doing). Both exams have a whole lot of questions from which you must choose just a few - plenty of options according to what you feel most comfortable with. The third term has to start being planned during the second (and possibly first) term, as it generally involves a period of work somewhere else. In my case, I spent 2 months in Durban, South Africa, doing an internship at a research centre on maternal health, family planning and HIV. You can either arrange yourself what you want to do, or you can choose from a set of options that school staff and charities will have prepared at some point during the second term. For some degrees, such as Immunology and Medical Microbiology, it might instead involve lab work at the school, which can start during the second term. Some people can also opt for doing a literature review of whichever subject they want, but that is not encouraged. By the end of the third term you must deliver a final report, which is quite comprehensive but not at all like a PhD thesis, and your final grade will take into account the second term assessments, the exams and the final report. In terms of everything else, LSHTM is a lot of fun! There is people from ALL over the world (really), from all kinds of backgrounds and all ages too, and the atmosphere feels like everyone is trying to learn as much as possible that year not only from the course but also from everyone else. There are plenty of parties (the school has its own bar in the basement) and plenty of opportunities to work and have fun together. We decided to have class sweatshirts made just for us, which I still have - they say "Risk Factor" on the back. I made some great friends that year with whom I'm still in touch =) Finally, I am currently studying for a PhD on Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London and thinking of keeping at it afterwards. Hope this helps! For more (formal) stuff: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk