PHDA testimonials

"I found a strength of the program to be the engagement of the other students, who are usually all from diverse backgrounds with varying levels of experience with the content. It was helpful to learn from each other. The workload was also quite manageable for those who are working full-time in addition to the courses. The teachers also all seemed knowledgeable and passionate about the topics, and were willing to help students answer their questions or provide assistance for the course projects."

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"PHDA 03 and 04 provided useful tools for me. I had always wanted to learn to use ArcGIS software to explore health data, and have both a geography and clinical background, so PHDA 03 and PHDA 04 were especially interesting."

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"The flexibility of timing due to the entirely online nature of the program stood out to me. I could work on things when I had the time, which I think is a great feature for people who are generally working full time. I also liked the mix of discussion and individual assignments in the courses; getting to hear others’ opinions and experiences was very useful."

"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."

"It was really good for me to gain more experience working with large data sets and use a secure research environment to get used to the complexities of various kinds of datasets we come across daily. The spatial data and network analysis work, applied longitudinal analysis techniques and foundational SAS skills I learned really benefitted my research work. Now when I am faced with new problems, I feel better equipped and much more confident to handle them.

I have done some online courses before. I felt the courses in this program were well organized. The labs were very useful and very applied, instructors were always available to answer questions and the weekly or biweekly course modules provided structure but also some flexibility."

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