DrPH Public Health and Epidemiology

I hope to contribute to progress in addressing health disparities and disproportionalities in the American health care system, as a PHD student in Public Health and Epidemiology at _____ University, and beyond. My central, professional long-term goal is to become a highly qualified and most effective social epidemiologist. I look forward to lifetime achievement in the search for a better understanding of how, where, and why inequalities affect public health, to be able to find effective and culturally responsive strategies that help to improve health outcomes for minorities. The doctoral degree in Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of ____ which is my first choice among doctoral programs for a variety of reasons, most of all the sheer excellence and rigor of your program. I am the best fit with the University of Minnesota, and your program represents my optimal springboard to advance my career in public health.  

Born and raised in South Korea, I first became concerned with public health issues in high school. Some of my classmates had mental health challenges, others had problems of a social nature that were grounded in sexual issues, especially sexually transmitted diseases, a sensitive topic in Korea. Some of my peers committed suicide, and I made it a point to find out as much detail as I could, and to reflect on why this happened. Some of the girls had to seek illegal abortions, adding illegality to an already traumatic situation. Thus, I came to appreciate early on how many if not most public health challenges or stressors are at least in some way grounded in or sustained by social factors.  

When I worked at a North Korean refugee center as a mentor for defector mothers and their children, I came to more fully appreciate the way that a lack of sex education and mental health challenges tend to coincide in Korean culture, frequently leading to shame and stigma, with suicide widespread and the numbers increasing. In fact, Korea is among those countries with the highest suicide rate in the world among women and adolescents. I also came to better appreciate the way that health topics and issues tend to be defined and interpreted based largely on the socio-cultural context of the discussion, and I learned that the different characteristics of each racial and ethnic population hold keys to finding appropriate and accurate solutions to the special challenges that they face. The gravity of our problems made me very highly motivated when I presented data on depression and suicide in Korea on World Health Day.    

I began my master's program in Public Health, and I was especially keen to learn all that I could about disparities in healthcare access along racial lines. In 2019, I had the opportunity to work as a graduate research fellow in the Dominican Republic for a summer internship. Through a program called Women Empowerment Initiative (WEI), I helped Haitian refugee women by creating and distributing sex and breastfeeding educational materials, developing evaluation papers for workshops, and visiting a local hospital where I met with local government officials to collect and evaluate data. My team discovered that there was a critical shortage of medical systems, facilities, staff, and transportation to hospitals, especially for refugee women. Much of this seemed to result from a pervasive gender inequality that is rooted in their culture. Even more fundamentally, these residents were discriminated against for being undocumented. I listened intently to their voices for some time and learned a great deal about the entrenched problems faced by Haitian refugees, especially women.  

After receiving my master's degree in public health, I began working at the Korean Adoptees Ministry (KAM) Center as the Program Manager where I could apply my knowledge and skills from my coursework directly to the minorities in my community who needed my help the most. As part of the Eliminating Health Disparities Initiative (EHDI) for the Korean immigrant and adoptive communities in Minnesota, I conducted a Community Readiness Assessment (CRA) with respect to the prevention of mental illness and suicide. Interviewing fifty residents of various occupations and backgrounds, I was able to create and conduct surveys regarding the changes to their lives that have resulted since the outbreak of COVID-19. I found that often if not usual, personal, and social perceptions of “mental health” had a negative impact on one’s chances of seeking help. Getting individuals of the various communities to participate in interviews and surveys was difficult. After numerous attempts at contacting, interviewing, and chatting with members of the community and their leaders, however, I was able to successfully promote the purpose of the EHDI project, reporting my findings to the community and the Minnesota Department of Health.   

At the KAM Center, I was also able to participate in the Koren government’s Gyeonggi Longitudinal Study (GEPS). As a research assistant and co-author, I explored and analyzed the factors affecting the suicidal ideation of Korean adolescents with a large data sample. My team found that the more middle school students experienced mental health problems such as depression and feelings of helplessness, the more frequent suicidal thoughts were. In the case of the girls, the more they experienced alienation and attachment issues with their parents, the more they tended to experience suicidal thoughts. We were also able to determine that mental health, alienation, academic stress, gender, household income, and delinquency are the main factors that relate in statistically significant ways with suicidal ideation among adolescents.   

I appreciate the University of ____’s world-renowned faculty, the multidisciplinary and innovative research centers such as the Center for Care Organization Research & Development, and The Epidemiology Clinical Research Center. I hope to pay especially close attention to the political and societal approaches to preventing chronic disease pandemics. It would be a special honor for me to study under and receive the guidance of Sonya Brady Ph.D., Susan Mason Ph.D., Rachel Widom Ph.D., Zobeida Bonilla Ph.D., and Marizen Ranurez Ph.D – all leading investigators in the areas of both Maternal and Child Health  

DrPH Public Health and Epidemiology