Practice

Online MPH Program Partners with Vineyard Health Center for Student Practicum Experience

For the Online MPH, the practicum was embedded within the program itself to help students streamline their experience.

When the School of Public Health planned to launch its innovative Online Master of Public Health in 2022, an early question was how to administer the CEPH-required practicum experience. 

At SPH, the practicum is a graduate-level internship that allows MPH students to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom in a real-world public health setting. On-campus students typically choose a practicum that is tailored to their interests and are responsible for securing one on their own, with guidance and support from the SPH Careers & Practicum Office.

For the Online MPH, the practicum is embedded within the program itself to help students streamline their experience, explained Madeline Crossley, senior director of the Online MPH. Instead of students searching for an external partner to work with, “we bring the partner to them within the module.”

For their practicum, students partnered with Island Health Care on Martha’s Vineyard to address pressing public health issues; first among them was improving medication adherence, especially among some of the most underserved residents. Crossley said students were able to join teams focusing on specific populations—diabetic patients, those with mental health issues, etc.—and then learned what measures the client previously tried and what programs are currently active, if any. 

Helping guide the students through the maze of possibilities was James Wolff, associate professor of global health at SPH, who is also the medical director at Island Health Care. Wolff, known to all his students as “Wolffy,” has an extensive background in teaching project-based courses that develop solutions for clients. He was able to guide students through monitoring and evaluation plans, budget management, logic models, stakeholder analysis and other critical elements. Said Crossley, “the students were learning those topics as they were applying them immediately towards the client.”

For Mohammed Harris, the practicum’s flexibility worked for his busy lifestyle as the father of four children under 4 years old. Harris was able to take his courses online and blend live sessions with asynchronous sessions that fit his often-hectic schedule. 

“That was one of my main reasons for pursuing the program, aside from the passion and motivation to pursue a public health degree,” said Harris, who works in diagnostic-assay development for YourBio Health, a young company working on devices that allow users or healthcare workers to painlessly collect blood samples. Expanding diagnostic capability in remote or low-resource settings could have a powerful positive influence on worldwide public health, Harris said, and being able to do the practicum with a healthcare provider offered an authentic hands-on experience that Harris hopes can be expanded for future cohorts.

During the module, all aspects of the practicum are tracked weekly. For the first few weeks, students learn about how proposals work by responding to a client RFP (request for proposal) that requires them to work through the criteria they would need to use in the real world. In subsequent weeks, students learn how to create a monitoring and evaluation plan and develop solutions for the specific issues that the client seeks to address. 

Weekly live sessions with Island Health Care representatives ensured that the students’ proposals were potentially actionable plans; in some cases the solutions presented were creative approaches that may not have been tried in the past, Crossley said. The new perspectives were particularly helpful in the stakeholder analysis phase of the projects, and helped provide in-depth reviews of the specific groups most at-risk—or most likely to benefit. 

The collaborative projects throughout the Online MPH allowed Harris to meet other students who work in diagnostics, biomarkers, and similar related fields. The grassroots-level policymaking incorporated into the curriculum offered a window into an important and under-recognized aspect of public health, helping contextualize the practicum experience.

“That was a very good addition to the program,” Harris said. “Rather than just focusing on biostatistics, epidemiology, or something that’s traditionally public health, the program brought in public policy and public affairs. We were walked through the process on how to submit a bill, how to get it reviewed by [legislators], and then we followed that whole legal process into policy implementation. That was a good learning experience.”

Crossley said SPH’s unique take on the Online MPH differs from many other fully online programs that require students to attend classes in person for a few weekends or for three weeks in the summer.

“There’s usually so much support that is required for practicums to be able to get people placed and the practicum office always has their hands full working on that,” Crossley said. “This is a huge opportunity for us to be able to offer this type of program to help our students, who already have full-time jobs and would struggle to find an additional major assignment.”

Learn more about the Online MPH at BU

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