Nancy Culbert, Chair of the ASPH Student Services Council, recently spoke with Dean Donna Petersen (University of South Florida College of Public Health), who was elected by the deans of ASPH member schools to the new position Liaison for Student Services. This position was created in part as a result of the increasingly organized and more complex activities of the student services and admissions directors of the ASPH member schools. We thank her for her time and thoughtfulness in this interview.

First, congratulations, Dean Petersen, on assuming the job of liaison for student services to the ASPH board of directors. Can you tell us about your background?
Well, I guess you could say I was born and raised in public health – I have a master’s and a doctoral degree in maternal and child health from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Bloomberg School of Public Health) and have spent my career working either with or for governmental public health agencies and more recently, within academic public health. Prior to coming to USF, I served as the academic affairs dean at the UAB School of Public Health, a position that included student affairs in addition to academic affairs, and I have been fortunate to have been able to maintain my interest in working with students at USF – I teach several master’s and doctoral courses each year and continue to advise master’s students and serve on doctoral committees.

What interested you in this particular position?
It was interesting that as an association of “schools” we had no one on the Board advocating for the interests of students and those who work within schools to assure students an excellent learning and professional development experience. Given my background, and my work with Delta Omega, the national honor society for public health, the new certification exam, the public health competencies, and undergraduate education n public health, it seemed like a good fit for me to take this on and shape this important role for the ASPH Board.

What are your goals for ASPH during your three-year tenure?
Rather simply, to keep student issues and ideas on the agenda, to make sure whatever we do as an organization benefits students and to highlight the great work that our student services professionals engage in across the country, sharing innovations and learning from our collective experiences. In a way, I hope that focusing on students reduces some of the natural competitiveness we feel as individual schools and allows us to achieve some successes collectively as an association.

What do you think are the most pressing challenges related to student services?
We all struggle with recruitment, with explaining what public health is and how it relates to other health professions, and with achieving a truly varied and diverse student body. Once we get the students in, we struggle with how to prepare them to be the best possible public health professionals, given the rather short amount of time most of us allow for master’s training. Many of us are challenged with where we each fit on the continuum of education in public health, i.e. should we delve into undergraduate education? Should we defer on that and instead create niche market master’s programs? Should we be in the continuing education business? What doctoral degrees should we offer and how many can we afford? And achieving a reasonable balance between teaching responsibilities, research and service among our faculty is always challenging, and affects students in different ways.

What drew you into public health?
Like many of us, I tripped over it. I was interested in nutrition but not in “food science” and you have to remember, this was back in the day when you had to go to the library to thumb through Peterson’s Guide to Graduate Schools. I knew I wasn’t interested in food chemistry but I couldn’t really articulate what it was I wanted to do – something about “community”. And I literally found myself on the page for Johns Hopkins and was reading about public health and voila! It clicked – this was it. Of course as luck would have it, they were folding their community nutrition program, but the fellow who was running it saw I was in earnest, so he forwarded my application to the chair of the department of maternal and child health – and here I am!

What advice would you give you someone considering public health as a career field?
We like to joke that there is no shortage of good work to be done in this field – yes, it is under-funded, under-appreciated, misunderstood, but the possibilities are endless. And if you really want to make a difference in the world, this is a great place to start. When I counsel prospective students I try to assess their “focus”, i.e. would they really rather work with individual clients or patients? Or are they comfortable with a wide-angle lens where they have the potential to affect the lives of many more people? Some people prefer the more immediate satisfaction of working directly with individuals and I usually steer them to the clinical professions. Others know already that they are more interested in policy, or environmental issues, or social issues that demand societal solutions – they belong in public health.

Several of the deans from other schools have daughters attending schools of public health. Any chance either of your two daughters will choose public health as a career field?
That’s an interesting question. My older daughter is starting college this fall at a small liberal arts college where she will dabble in all things interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up in public health – it seems to be in her soul – but right now the world is open to her and I’ve encouraged her to explore lots of different things. My younger daughter has always exhibited a bent toward engineering or architecture (like her grandfather), but there’s always public health and urban planning!

Since you are the current president of Delta Omega, do you want to make a plug to schools that do not have Delta Omega chapters?
What?! There are schools that do not have Delta Omega chapters? How silly of them! Every school should have a Delta Omega chapter to recognize their best and brightest. It is relatively painless, not terribly expensive, connects you to a large network of professionals across the country and allows each school the opportunity to honor their best students, faculty and community partners. A winning combination!

You are also the chair of the National Board of Public Health Examiners. Congratulations to you and the rest of the board on the first exam that was just administered last month. Do you think the effort has been successful so far?
Well we are still assessing the results and hope to have scores posted soon. The fact that we had nearly 900 folks register for what in essence is an unknown commodity reflects that there is an interest in certification among recent graduates and established professionals – over half of the registrants graduated more than three years ago. We are certainly hopeful we will see greater numbers registering next year, once we have proved that we are here to stay. I would also say that organizing this effort required a very strong partnership between the academic and practice communities and in that regard, it has certainly been a success. The Board includes representatives of accredited schools, accredited programs, state health officials, local health officials and the American Public Health Association. We also have private sector representatives and several very active at-large members. No one is compensated for this service – they each do it because they care deeply about the profession of public health and want to see it on a par with the other health professions with whom we work, all of which have some type of certification. It will be interesting to see how all of this unfolds in the future. Stay tuned!