Career Satisfaction: Health-Care Admin and Epidemiologist

So, the final degree I'm going to be talking about, as you know, is the Master of Public Health degree. This certifies you to do any number of things involving public health, but perhaps the two most common careers for someone with this degree are Healthcare Administration and Epidemiology.

Healthcare administrators manage public health, specifically those related to healthcare. This mostly involves hospital and hospital-system management. According to the College Foundation of North Carolina, the field commands high levels of job satisfaction, but is incredibly stressful. This suits itself well to a certain type of person, but if one does not deal well with stress, it might not be a great fit. Still, CNN Money awards it an "A" ranking for personal satisfaction, and a "B" for flexibility, so, with a fairly high average pay, it's definitely well-worth considering.

Epidemiologists work on understanding, predicting, and containing infectious disease outbreaks. This can be done in the field (for example, containing Ebola in Africa, or coordinating vaccination in Asia) or in the lab (manufacturing vaccines, understanding viral factors, predicting outbreak paths). They, too, report very high levels of personal satisfaction, with CNN Money awarding it an "A" for personal satisfaction, a "B" for flexibility and a "C" for low stress, with healthcare administration having a "D". For those who really want to make a difference in the world though, and to seriously improve public health in less-developed and developed parts of the world alike, Epidemiologist could be a very good choice.

Finally, if you like both of these ideas, there is the field of Healthcare Epidemiology. It's a subbranch of epidemiology that involves managing disease outbreaks in hospitals. Contrary to what you might think, hospitals have HUGE infection rates. Many, many people get sick in hospitals, and Healthcare Epidemiologists try to understand why and reduce the risk. It takes specialized training, though, and there aren't many statistics on the job satisfaction level, but it's definitely an option.