New MU dual-degree combines journalism and public health
Students can earn a Master's in journalism and public health beginning in Spring 2011.
Published Dec. 29, 2010
MU will begin offering a graduate dual degree program combining journalism and public health, effective spring 2011.
MU’s Masters of Public Health program and the School of Journalism will facilitate the program for students wanting to pursue careers involving the media and medical fields. According to a news release, graduates from this program will earn both a master of the arts in journalism degree and a master of public health degree.
The interdisciplinary program in journalism will be focused around strategic communication. For public health, the focus will be around health promotion and policy.
“The students are requesting dual degrees in a number of areas,” said Kristofer Hagglund, director for the Masters of Public Health program. “Public health is a particularly good field to pair with another field because it is, by definition, interdisciplinary.”
Students were showing an interest in learning how to combine learning about journalism and the health professions together, said Jon Stemmle, associate director of the Health Communications Research Center under the School of Journalism and Sinclair School of Nursing.
“As far as our center goes, we had often had MPH students wanting to learn more about health communications, and (they) wanted to learn how to do better with their writing for health purposes, and we had journalism students wanting to learn more about health,” Stemmle said.
Stemmle said graduates of the program would be able to understand health and journalism affairs at the same time to perform in jobs such as a PR spokesperson for a hospital or an information specialist at a governmental health agency, among a wide variety of others.
“They would have that basic recognition of not only health matters, but how the data works, how to find things,” Stemmle said. “And then from the journalism point of view, they would understand how to use that data to get that point across.”
Hagglund said most of the courses have content that overlaps between journalism and public health, but there are still a few courses that apply solely to journalism or public health to provide students with basic knowledge of both fields before teaching how they interact.
The dual degree program has been in the works for about a year, most of that time spent putting the curriculum through committees, and making sure it was conducive to students’ needs and desires, Hagglund said.
According to the news release, 20 credit hours will come from each the journalism program and the public health program and 21 hours will be shared by each, making a total of 61 credit hours.
Students wanting to inquire more about the program are encouraged to contact the School of Journalism or the Masters of Public Health program.