I have a nursing background I'm Canadian initially
but then did a nursing degree. I came to London,
actually took my master's at the London School in 2011
where I focused on public health and
after finishing - that was like an amazing year of education -
I fell in love with the School, I fell in love with London
and I decided to - kind of based on what I've learned -
that I want to go into work abroad in sub-Saharan Africa
so I spent about four, four and a half years
working on humanitarian programming
with a focus on outbreak response so I worked in the the really big
Ebola response in West Africa in 2014-2015
You know, I think I've always known that as much as I love academia,
I didn't want to be an academic - and not like being doing a DrPH means you can't
be an academic - but it's much more intended for people
who intend to stay in practice and I wanted the robust
research skills I would get from a DrPH, so like really kind of how do you
interrogate a research question? how do you design a study?
how do you run that study? how do you write it up and get it published?
I wanted all of that but I wanted it in a very
practical setting.
I found the taught modules very helpful. I mean they're not methods courses
so they are quite theoretical
but I think they opened my eyes to do different ways of
thinking about policy or management problems that
I hadn't necessarily ever seen written down before, I mean
I had worked as a manager, I had worked kind of lightly in policy but I never
really had frameworks to kind of think through these problems
So for my OPA which I did with my old organisation
GOAL Global so I was still kind of working for them part time when I did it
which worked out really well because I had
a lot of insider knowledge, I had the opportunity to engage with
people to come up with a research question that was applicable to my
interests as well as something that would be very useful
for them and what we ended up going with was
essentially how did we take the learning from West Africa's Ebola outbreak
and transfer some of that knowledge to other countries
where the organisation worked.
I did my field work in Sierra Leone in quite a rural setting,
so my days were often on the back of a motorcycle,
kind of driving to kind of very rural spaces
covered in dust with my incredible research assistant that I'd hired in-country
sitting down with groups of women
talking about their reproductive health journeys
during the Ebola outbreak.
I've been to at least four or five conferences
I've been to a couple that were very related to my thesis research so around
family planning in Rwanda, I went to the International
Conference on Family Planning, I did the research degrees poster day
before I started my thesis research, that was really nice because in the end
you get a lot of feedback from your supervisory team
but not necessarily from other profs unless you really seek it out
so doing the poster day gives you an opportunity to get feedback
from your fellow students but also from professors outside of
your quite narrow group
I see myself probably working for either
a mid-size NGO with a focus on humanitarian health
I'd like to be their research director
kind of role, or potentially working for more of a
think tank type body. So I'm thinking of the
Overseas Development Institute or something similar
To build your network as much as possible while you're there,
whether you're online or in person, the wealth of knowledge
that people at the school have is incredible
and the kind of three degrees of separation to pretty
much anybody you would ever want to meet is possible
from the School. So if you can connect with people
who are in the field that you're interested in, chances are they know somebody at the
NGO that you're interested in working with
or at the WHO body or in that donor group.
So it's really important to build positive
working relationships while you're there.
I'm gonna miss the School when I leave. I'm gonna try
to maintain some kind of connection.