PHDA testimonials

"Overall, the PHDA 03 course experience was great. The greatest benefit to me was learning about GIS and practicing the learning through lab assignments with ArcGIS."

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"I would like to recommend PHDA courses to others. I believe the program is very practical and useful to those working in the public health field. It provides a good opportunity for the development of a future career plan.

I learned how to use several popular software programs such as SAS, R, ArcGIS and Mplus. All of them are very helpful. The PHDA 06 course about Health Services Program Monitoring and Evaluation helped me evaluate my work program. "

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"The growing importance of spatial thinking in health policy and epidemiology underscores the immense value of this course for researchers and practitioners alike. As a frequent user of GIS, I found this course to be an indispensable update to both my technical skills and theoretical understanding of health geography and spatial data analysis.

The course material challenged us to think creatively and conduct our own projects with the support of the instructor, while the weekly lab assignments guided us closely through the necessary procedures. Weekly discussions encourage us to discuss issues and themes in health GIS and share ideas, an invaluable experience for learning and networking."

"The course was well structured. Through the course, I learned: a formal approach to developing, structuring and answering a research question using administrative data; how to clearly define the study population; how to develop a flow chart to illustrate, and guide, the development of an analytical dataset; and SAS skills. It was an excellent course and a good refresher for me, as it has been 5 years since I’ve done data analysis. A number of course assignments required me to pair with a fellow student and undergo peer review of one another’s code. It was interesting to see how my peer structured their code to produce their dataset. I enjoyed and learned a lot from this exchange. The flexibility of distance learning meant that it was possible to complete work at my own pace and schedule. It was also helpful to learn from students in different locations, who worked in related fields but had different strengths, skills and perspectives.

Finally, this course gave me experience working with administrative datasets and tools that can be difficult to access on the job. The opportunity to work with samples of real data exposed me to some of the challenges I could face at work in learning, cleaning, formatting and analyzing the data. I would highly recommend this course and the PHDA program to my colleagues. It’s a well-structured and organized program and provides a good theoretical and practical approach to population health data analysis."

"Both the PHDA 03 and PHDA 04 courses have made me confident working in ArcGIS, and applying principles of GIS/mapping to population health data and working on spatial analyses. In particular, what has been most helpful about these courses is applying the background theory to surveillance and research questions and walking through the analysis from start to finish, including interpretation of results."

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