PhD???

Over the past three four months I have been thinking about what next after my Master's? I had a student loan to pay for and so I had thought I would work for an year in the field and then get back to doing my PhD. However, now with the loan of my head, I have started to envision ideas of getting in to a PhD right after my MPH. It seems a sensible thing to do as I would like to finish all my education in one go and also the fact that my contacts at school could come handy in getting into a PhD program now than they would after an year from now.
The problem also starts there. What is going to be my research focus?
I always wanted to do something to do with infectious diseases and that resolve had grown stronger. I want to explore Malaria and ways in which I could shed some light for better combating the disease. Yet, with each passing day all I come up with are ideas which have already been put to test. I took the GIS class and started thinking that this is a echnology that would be lacking back home and I could use this to develop a probability model for India. However, in the process of collecting data for Gujarat for my GIS class project on malaria I cam across hordes of GIS maps for the whole of Gujarat state and in some cases for the whole country. That left me stunned as I was never expecting the system back home to be so advanced. My perception of the level of competence of health data and infromation in India was totally wrong and now my probability model seems like an idea from the 1990s...
Yesterday I read a mutilevel analysis with spatial cluster dectection for dengue for another class project and I was totally hooked. I have now started to think about using this for malaria hoping that not much has been done with this approach and that it would be useful for the disease modelling. However, I am not convinced as the idea is far from original and therefore is eating me up.
I wonder what it is that you need to present as a research model for your PhD consideration and what level of depths do you need to go to get one. Still going on and thinking what it would be like. Would spend the second part of my summer semester exploring the journals for Malaria.

1 comment:

deepupsm said...

Buddy i was asking if its good to join it as faculty as i found a opinion from a person of p h be of worth
please accept me as on ur freind list so that v may be able to interact in much better way or do send me ur email for ur reference i , m deepak md in psm just completed Phd in Epid and had an offer to join PHFI as AP