Rationale

Just as practicing medicine is focused on the needs of individuals, a profession in public health focuses on the needs of entire populations or the entire world. Public health is an incredibly broad field, spanning from epidemics to making sidewalks safer and everything in between. Some of the vital work that public health officials are currently doing are battling HIV, protecting refugees, finding ways to prevent gun violence in schools, and trying to reduce practices that accelerate climate change. Paired with statistics, public health can be a powerful tool to not only prevent injury or illness but also to create lasting and positive change on an individual’s life and a community’s well-being. Data analysis provides the evidence of how public health efforts do or do not effectively impact a given health concern.

Pairing the ethics of public health with statistical modeling is an interdisciplinary approach to solving important issues that impact the entire world. This major is not just a mathematics major, a sociology/anthropology major, or a bio mathematics concentration, nor is it like any other traditional major offered at St. Olaf. Unlike any of the previously mentioned subjects, it is an effort to connect the cold, hard data with living & breathing people. It considers how to connect people who may not understand the ins & outs of a statistical analysis with the information they need to make ethical and appropriate health decisions. Public health permeates nearly every aspect of our lives and can be examined in so many contexts and through so many viewpoints. Not only does it examine health, an abstract concept in its own right, but it encapsulates problem solving, teamwork, creativity, public outreach, and data collection all in one topic. This major is suited for St. Olaf in particular because it fits in perfectly with the college’s values and the mission statement. The major spans across a wide variety of subjects, will allow me to become a more globally engaged citizen, and will help me to examine values in a variety of different communities.

My proposed major starts with the background necessary to understand the data analysis, namely mathematics courses related to theory and decision making. It culminates in studying machine learning for complex algorithms for decision making, which is a modern approach to dealing with data. This is expanded by considering the ethics and implications of making decisions. The “Epidemiology and Medicine” portion compliments this by examining possible responses to public health issues, specifically for disease outbreaks and related illness, looking at the microscopic level and the global level. This is expanded by considering the ethics and implications of making decisions. Classes included in the “Ethical Decisions” portion discuss how individuals, communities, and the entire world respond to health crises, and how the people in charge of making the decisions that will impact people must consider more than just raw data.