Name: Carolyn Guertin McHugh
Position: Medical student
Organization: UW School of Medicine
Year graduated from UW DEH: 1998
Degree: BS (UW DEH), MPH (UC Berkeley)
DEH Program: undergraduate

Carolyn Guertin McHugh went from our undergraduate program to earn a Master of Public Health (MPH) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is now a second year medical student at the UW School of Medicine.

After graduating from UW DEH in 1998, she held three public health related positions:

• for the California Emerging Infections Program, she interviewed patients and their families about exposure to Shigella, E. coli, Campylobacter, which can cause food poisoning. Her project was funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
  
• as a research assistant at the Labor Occupational Health Program/UC Berkeley, worked on research about healthcare access and barriers to injured workers.
  
• as a data specialist at Public Health-Seattle & King County, she worked as an Epidemiologist I in the Immunization/Communicable Disease program. She worked on a study of child vaccination rates and parental attitudes.
  

"I enjoyed being part of research and getting to talk to patients one on one," she said. "I also found it exciting to be around other public health practitioners and keep up to date on recent outbreaks and research going on in the field." Her research and MPH work convinced her that she I wanted to have a more active, direct role in health care, which led her medical school.

She has found medical school "one of the most difficult and satisfying challenges in my life.... One thing that I didn’t really appreciate until a started med school is that being a doctor is not just a job, it is a lifestyle." However, she advises undergraduates, "if you love working with people, and want an exciting job in which you are constantly challenged and continually learning, than medicine may be the perfect fit for you."

As an undergraduate in the Department of Environmental Health, she particularly enjoyed courses such as the water and food course that had an emphasis on microbiology. She received a minor in microbiology as well.

"My undergraduate education at UW DEH was incredibly valuable for graduate school and medical school. UW is one of the only universities that offer an undergraduate degree in any public health discipline. Having had some background in epidemiology, statistics, microbiology, public health policy, and so on definitely gave me an edge over the other students in grad school."

For her MPH, she chose UC Berkeley for the Infectious Diseases program in its Epidemiology department . "I had a wonderful professor who was an Infectious Disease physician whose clinical stories really got me excited about medicine. "

Both her undergraduate and graduate degrees have given her a "'big picture" of health in society that many medical students lack. "I have a better sense of the, I understand how waste is handled, how water gets treated, how the public health infrastructure works to keep our community healthy. I found a love for public health when I was an Environmental Health student and it is a field that I plan to return to.

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