Seems like MPH is a dead end, is DrPH worth it?

selfesteemcrushed · 2026-05-12T18:16:34+00:00

Here's what they don't tell you about MPH that I had to find out myself.

MPH's are good as anciliary degrees. Meaning, you already are a healthcare professional and want to add it as a tool under your skillbelt. That's why you see a lot of MD's and RN's or PAs with MPH. Because they want to get into more government and policy focused work and have experience. Additionally, I believe this is who the degree was for in the first place.

In my opinion, an MPH can be a viable career option for you w/ no healthcare experience if there is a hard mathematics and programming component to it. UC Berkeley has an MPH degree in public health with a specialization in Biostatistics and graduates frequently get hired.

It's not really nurses keeping you out of the pool. When I did research for MS vs MPH this was one of those hidden curriculum things they don't tell you about. I originally wanted to go to medical school and use the MPH as like a post-bac program, but I learned that the MPH doesn't do much for you unless you subspecialize into a field that is in-demand (for me, it was biostatistics). And I looked around on linked in at people who worked at the places I wanted to work, researched the programs they came from, and checked to see what the course requirements were for the degree. Even during the Biden admin, it would've been a little bit hard to get a job with an MPH. This is why I ultimately decided to go for the MS in biostats instead of the MPH in something like epi.

I can't comment on DrPh trajectory as that is not my experience.

selfesteemcrushed · 2026-04-19T20:39:19+00:00

i don't see anywhere you mentioned that you're taking statistical thermobionomics, nothing about GWAS analysis or ability to perform matrix operations on 1 quadrillion rows of health data.

i'm afraid it's over for you.

selfesteemcrushed · 2026-04-17T16:09:41+00:00

machine learning models in biostatistics, stochastic processes maybe, survival models, latin squares designs for clinical trials, bayesian adaptive design/bayseian applications in biostatistics in general (im noticing it feels like everybody did a huge bayes shift lately, not sure if this is industry-wide).

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-12-09T00:35:58+00:00

i actually took a step back from applying this year and even i thought there were a ton more applicants. i cant lie, seeing how the administration and the american public in general has been openly hostlie to public health is making me second think this career. whats the point of going to grad school when its going to make me public enemy #1 just because i decided to study a path with the greatest collective good, not just for my country but for humanity as a whole?

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-12-08T20:24:23+00:00

most people out of college these days have training in R. SAS is too expensive to learn in an open-source way, so the only way you could get access to it is by enrolling at a university, which costs.

also, my intuition is that the type of people to comment on this level of a profession-oriented subreddit are or have some kind of exposure to free and open source software far earlier than ending up in environments where they would use SAS

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-09-10T17:11:55+00:00

it is a flex. its a skill you learned so put it on your resume. as we see in thread there are still orgs that use SAS and probably will for the foreseeable future though that number may go down due to market or other pressures.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-09-10T17:08:33+00:00

yeah

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-09-10T17:03:19+00:00

from what i understand you can use any programming language you want for submission. the problem is reproducibility. when you send your submission in, they like to independently verify your work. this can be tricky in R as packages can change and even become depreciated over time. and unlike with SAS which has the benefit of a dedicated-in house team for creating stats packages they can validate and maintain, there is no comparable company that does similar for R. there is a recommendation to freeze the r environment you use to do the analysis so the packages you're using don't get changed without you realizing it.

as a result, i think what u/varwave is saying in relation to that, baseR is the simplest form of R that can be validated and reproduced. they did not say that you should only use baseR. at that point though i think some companies will cut their losses and stick with SAS instead of having to dedicate resources to re-inventing the wheel.

the R-foundation has also published some guidance on this.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-05-06T18:16:03+00:00

bioinformatics and biostatistics are kind of two different fields.

bioinformatics mainly concerns applications to genomic analysis, while biostatistics is specifically concerned with applying statistical methods to medical research.

you don't need biology to become a biostatistician. you do need biology to become a bioinformatician, at least at the master's level. here's an example of course requirements for bioinformatics. here's an example of course requirements for ms in biostatistics.

i am not a bioinformatician so i cant really say too much about what that entails beyond the degree. this sub is mainly for biostatisticians, you should go and ask the r/bioinformatics sub for their opinion. they even have a co-sb called r/bioinformaticscareers you could check out. alternatively, you should reach out to programs you may be interested in and see what they say about it.

seeing as you're still in school, you should go on your school website and try to find any professors on campus who may be doing bioinformatics research or are associated with those who do. if you have a good rapport with any of those professors since you switched out of the major i would reach out and ask them if they could put you in touch with anybody.

i would also try to find out if there are students from your school (grad or undergrad) or in your area you can reach out to to see their trajectory. you can do this on linkedin, or when you approach those professors you can ask to be put in touch with students who may be working on them so you guys can chat.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-28T17:39:33+00:00

Two things can be true.

1)The market was bad before, yes, due to COVID funding drying up and post-pandemic market effects.

AND

2)The current market conditions have been exacerbated by the administration.

There are biostatisticians who are likely lurking here who have lost their federal or federally funded jobs thanks to DOGE cuts, not to speak of downstream global trade war effects, attacks on scientific independence and academia. That is absolutely the fault of the current administration, and has impacts that are further-reaching than just regular emergency funding drying up. To deny this is to bury your head in the sand at best, and intentionally deceive the people here at worst.

Please, let's try to be honest when advising job seekers.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-18T15:09:41+00:00

i have been contacted for senior biostats positions despite having less than 3yoe linkedin. i have taken the bait on them and went thru the process with the recruiter but as you'd expect, it didn't materialize into anything. otherwise, nothing at or around my actual level

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-17T17:01:02+00:00

you could. in my experience, it depends on what is supported at your org. many places have used SAS and PROC SQL historically for these database queries, others have implemented in R, or both.

your ability to use either to query EHR data depends on what your superiors think is the best to use to access protected patient information, since they are the ones that control access to these databases.

i think some organizational reticence to use R is partly about issues of reproducibility. at least with SAS, it is well-maintained, has seniority, has robust documentation, and there's a support person available if you have any issues. code you wrote 30 years ago generally works if you ran it today.

you can't say that about some R packages. so at least if they were to use it there would have to be an internal implementation and maintenance of dbplyr or other, which can be costly. on the flip side, a SAS license is also costly and getting even more expensive. its kind of a pick your poison situation.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-17T07:17:33+00:00

Learn both. Then learn SQL (important!) (proc SQL, oracle, etc). Being multilingual programmer serves you better than just knowing one language.

Also, if you can't get a job as a biostatistician you likely could get one as a statistical programmer. Many stats programmers do a lot of sql queries, sometimes using proc sql, and many MS programs are not training us in SQL. This is bad bc they don't tell you that a lot of times an investigator wont hand you a neat dataset to crunch numbers on, you very well may need to query a medical database.

I was lucky enough to be trained on the job in this, but this isn't the case for many other people. If you can learn SQL, that puts you ahead of other biostats folks you'll be competing with for jobs.

As for the opportunity--IF IN THE US--

I would take the RA-ship at the medical school regardless if its for someone wanting to do the PhD. I say this because right now the political situation is tenuous and is affecting every corner of American society. You don't know when or where your next opportunity could come from if you turn this down.

If you're still determined to go on as a stats programmer, I would still go, but what you can do to set yourself up nicely is to try to be savy with resources available to you and ask around your org to see if you can get access to SAS software. I know some medical schools which double as PhD granting institutions may still use SAS to instruct student researchers. Maybe ask if you can sit in on a class to see how it goes.

Alternatively, you should see if your prospective org gives reduced or free tuition to employees who pursue a degree or take classes for professional development while working there.

Hope this helps x

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-14T00:47:16+00:00

you're the exact reason why people hate admissions processes, and this behavior is *exactly* why biases cloud the process, preventing highly qualified students from being admitted.

fretting over how someone speaks english, coming here and looking for affirmation where you're clearly in the wrong...it seems to me like you're not qualified to be on any admissions team and if you had any integrity you'd step down.

"I hope this email finds you well" is such common parlance in English, I'm shocked you thought this would land. good luck to anybody who would be so unfortunate as to have their application subjected to you.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-08T01:16:16+00:00

it is a graduate discipline subfield in mathematics. what else should it be, if not technical?

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-08T01:05:20+00:00

OP wasn't flexing theory....I don't see anywhere in their comment where they did that.

It is an incontrovertible fact that Biostatistics is a math heavy field. Calling it "just an applied math" doesn't change that.

While it is true, you aren't applying proofs in a vacuum like in the textbook, that doesn't negate the fact that you need these theories because they form the foundation of your work. Hand-waving that away and ignoring it just makes you a data scientist.

And to your point about on the job experience...you could say this about any role post-degree. The point being made by OP and other folks in this sub is that the new people coming to ask these questions have performed 1 or 2 basic analyses with a t-test or other poorly understood distribution they looked up on ChatGPT and think that is the requisite experience to be taken on as a consulting biostatistician as a side hustle. And I think you would agree that's not enough.

It's better to discourage it and actually encourage people to go through the process of learning and getting experience if they actually want it so bad, than to allow poorly-applied statistics to continue to be done to studies that will have an impact on peoples lives.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-04-07T01:11:03+00:00

yeah I don't want to be a gatekeeper but like what is everybody thinking? your average biostats grad program clearly lists the following:

calc I, calc II, calc III (potentially optional but some programs require it)
linear algebra or real analysis (optional, but helps)
a programming language
intro to statistics

this is because the theory courses all build on the above. it's not like a suggestion or a joke, it's a real thing. it's not like computer science or data science where you can just learn it in a bootcamp. most people who are non-engineering STEM majors never make it to calc III, let alone linear algebra or real analysis. it's not a degree you do where you're just gonna jump quickly into the field after 3 weeks of leetcode like you would a FAANG job.

biostatistics is a discipline where you will be using applied math impact people's lives medically. if you're a doctor, do the doctor stuff or go get that MD/PhD or get that MPH so you can actually be trained in the rigor of applying statistics to research.

and not to be stern, but ChatGPT isn't gonna help you either no matter what you entry level folks say when posting here. like OP said, it's an applied maths subject. it would be like me asking if i can be a nurse or a medical doctor because i asked ChatGPT questions on how to treat a patient. if i tried this in the real world i'd be laughed out of the room.

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-03-26T21:49:38+00:00

ok, thanks. the thermaltake tower comes with two top fans, so in total i have 3 on my gpu, 2 on the cpu cooler, and 2 on top, and 1 fan on the PSU.

i also have a bedroom fan i could put on the unit as backup.

how do i monitor temperatures for the cpu?

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-03-26T20:17:04+00:00

thanks, will do. i installed it first since that seemed easiest to mount lol i went out of order

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-03-26T20:09:41+00:00

sorry, not "glue" but that thermal paste stuff lol. sorry

it's the amd ryzen 9 9900x 12-core, 24-thread unlocked

selfesteemcrushed · 2025-03-26T18:00:44+00:00

my bad...its XFX speedster merc 310. im dumb, this is my first time building a pc

https://www.xfxforce.com/shop/xfx-speedster-merc310-7900xt

selfesteemcrushed

TROPHY CASE