PBHL 7660

The Applied Practice Experience (APE) is an integral component of the Master of Public Health Degree in the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia. The experience is a supervised, 300-hour field internship placement where students apply academic training in real-world public health settings. Students complete the APE working with a community partner, which could be any entity with a public health focus, such as health departments, non-profits, or physician organizations. Students complete two, high-quality deliverables (a “Comprehensive Site Profile” and a poster for a college-wide academic poster session) during the experience. These deliverables might be related to such enterprises as program development/evaluation, policy analyses, or data analysis reports. Completing the APE demonstrates mastery of a number of foundational competencies, which are a consensus set of knowledge & ​skills for the broad practice of public health identified by the Council on Education for Public Health, the accrediting body for graduate public health programs. Competencies include the ability to, e.g., interpret results of data analysis for public health research, identify root causes of health inequities, and other analogous skills that are informed by traditional public health core knowledge areas (e.g., biostatistics, epidemiology, health promotion and behavior, health services administration and environmental health sciences).

The accompanying work products are components associated with my APE, completed in spring semester, 2026. One item is a comprehensive site profile that fully describes my APE, in which I partnered with a physicians group in Northeast Georgia to design and implement a Spanish-language health education program to promote free & low-cost screening for colon cancer among the region’s large Hispanic population. The second deliverable is an image of a poster describing highlights of my APE that I presented while attending a research symposium in Athens, Georgia, hosted by UGA’s College of Public Health on April 28, 2026.