The Program in Public Health offers an opportunity for an accelerated Master in Public Health (MPH) degree program with several undergraduate degrees including:
- Bachelor of Science (BS) in Applied Mathematics and Statistics
- Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Women's and Gender Studies
- Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Earth and Space Sciences
Students in these programs can complete both degrees in 10-12 semesters. For the first two or three years, students complete undergraduate coursework including General Education and undergraduate major requirements. During either their third or fourth year (once a majority of their undergraduate degree requirements are completed), students begin taking graduate courses as outlined by the Plan of Study. In their fifth and sixth years, students complete the remaining graduate requirements for the MPH degree.
Admissions Requirements
Under Stony Brook University policy, students must complete 60 credits of undergraduate course work (Junior Status) with a minimum GPA of 3.0 in all college work before being admitted into any combined Bachelor/Masters degree program. Additional entry requirements for the MPH combined degree consist of:
- GPA of at least 3.3 in courses required by the undergraduate major
- Two letters of recommendation from faculty members in the undergraduate major
- Completion of the MPH application for review by the MPH Admissions Committee
For more information on these programs, please contact at publichealth@stonybrookmedicine.edu.
Stony Brook Undergraduate Students
Consider taking the following class:
HPH 201: What is Public Health? A Humanities Approach
The idea of “public health” could arguably be described as an endeavor of figuring out how to promote health protective measures across populations of disparate individuals, who, even though they are mostly strangers to one another, depend on one another in important ways. In this sense, despite individual needs and preferences, we are “all in it together.” At the same time, we are a society which prizes personal responsibility and seeks out individual attention and expression. That we are not a homogeneous people, but rather a mosaic of individuals in the United States, draws this problem of balancing values into bolder relief. How do we keep a population safe and healthy while respecting our highly individualized national character?
This course adopts a humanities-based approach to thinking about how to answer this question, i.e., it utilizes non-fictional and fictional literature in order to induce students to think critically and adopt the perspective of disparate stakeholders invested in the good of keeping the public healthy and healthful. Thus, the course introduces the field of public health through narratives intended to highlight a tension between a population as a whole as well as the individuals who make it up. Throughout the semester, we will utilize novels, first-person accounts, drama, and essays where students have an opportunity to think through seminal “threshold” questions on their own. When should immunization be required and when does a mandatory vaccination policy violate bodily integrity? When it comes to health care, are we responsible for our neighbor? How about policies pertaining to smoking cigarettes, or firearms, or even diet? Where should the government nudge paternalistically, and where does government oversight go too far? How about the opioid epidemic sweeping across the heartland? Who is accountable? How about the intersection between money and health care? What are our citizens owed just by virtue of being a citizen? Should healthcare in general not be socialized?
This course is interdisciplinary, representing a fusion of the humanities and public health, with an eye toward confronting the many ethical issues which arise upon seeking a preventive approach to healthcare. While our topic is how to promote the collective good of health in a public setting, our approach will be to utilize a narrative approach to understanding our topic by accessing disparate voices from within different communities in order to bring into bold relief the merits and challenges inherent in alternative approaches to thinking about care preventively, communally, and in a manner that is maximally sensitive to the health crises facing us today.
SBC Designations: HUM, CER
Prerequisite for Course: WRT 102
