Personal Statement and Writing Sample

PERSONAL STATEMENT

In your statement of purpose, please discuss the following in one to two single-spaced pages:

  1. Your professional, academic, and community experiences
  2. The area of research you wish to potentially pursue as a student in the program, the name of at least one member of the Epidemiology PhD Program Faculty or Participating Faculty who shares this research interest, A brief statement regarding your proposed research area interests with the research of the identified faculty member(s),
  3. Your specific interest in UNC Charlotte’s program
  4. Your career and personal goals including how the program aligns with your career plans
  5. How you plan to actively participate in UNC Charlotte’s mission to advance health equity and well-being in an urbanizing world*

WRITING SAMPLE

In addition to the statement of purpose, a writing sample is required for all applications to the PhD program in Epidemiology. Your writing sample should:

  1. Demonstrate aptitude for scholarly writing e.g., a literature review, a report of a needs assessment or evaluation project, a master’s thesis, or a published original research article on a public health or an epidemiologic topic where the applicant is the sole or first author.
  2. Demonstrate conceptual and analytic skills
  3. Use appropriate and consistent citation and reference formatting
  4. Applicants without existing examples of academic or scholarly writing should develop a 10-20 page paper on an epidemiology topic of interest that demonstrates conceptual skills and writing ability, use appropriate and consistent citation and reference formatting

*Based on CEPH Accreditation Criteria – https://media.ceph.org/documents/2024.Criteria.pdf