Allison Caputa

Philosophy Statement

“Health care is vital to all of us some of the time. But public health is vital to all of us all
of the time.” This quote by C. Everett Koop speaks volumes about the public health profession.
Public health is my passion and what I feel is my calling in life. The population I want to serve is
global. I want to help as many people as possible. The health topic I am most interested in and
plan to work in is epidemiology. Global health and epidemiology will allow me to be able to
travel all around the world and focus on the biology aspect of public health. I found my passion
for epidemiology while working on my undergraduate degree. Most of my family works in
healthcare and that was always the path I wanted to go down, but I did not know exactly what I
wanted to do. I took a microbiology of human disease lecture and lab. We watched the movie
Contagion one day in lecture which centers around an epidemiologist during a global pandemic
and I knew that was what I wanted to do. The Covid-19 pandemic only solidified my drive for
epidemiology and public health. Being able to see my current career path become mainstream
and see that it was relevant only made my passion stronger. I hope that someday during my
career I can stop another pandemic from occurring or at least make sure it does not happen on the
global scale that it is now.
Epidemiology is not only extremely relevant to society today, but is such an important
part of my major, public health. The overall goal of public health is to help our target audience
achieve overall wellness. There are six dimensions of wellness. These include social, spiritual,
physical, intellectual, emotional, and environmental. Epidemiology focuses on physical wellness.
A person cannot achieve overall wellness if they are not physically healthy. My overall
philosophy lies with physical state. This is that a person cannot be fully healthy until their body
systems are healthy and working. Epidemiologists work to track diseases, especially outbreaks,
and to try identify risk factors for that disease and preventative measures. Being able to educate
the public on risk factors, severity, and preventative measures can change behavior. This is
shown with the health belief model. Making sure someone understands how severe something is
and how susceptible they are can help change behavior. The Covid-19 pandemic is a great
example. No one really took Covid-19 seriously until epidemiologists learned how dangerous the
virus really is and shared that information with the government and the public. Now, the
government was able to put in policies in place, like safer at home orders and closing non-
essential businesses, that can help keep the public safe. Without epidemiologists learning the
severity of Covid-19 more people could have potentially gotten sick.
This is why I am continuing to study public health and epidemiology. My overall goal is
to help people. When I eventually complete my studies, I will be qualified to work on
discovering risk factors, preventative measures, and how to contain outbreaks of viruses and
diseases. I will help society as I will help prevent them from getting diseases and viruses that
could really affect their lives. New bacteria and viruses that cause deadly illness in people are
being discovered constantly. It is the work of epidemiologists that help protect the general
public. My future goal is to continue and finish my Bachelors degree in spring of 2020. After
that I will start my Masters degree in epidemiology. In terms of my long term plans, I hope to
finish my Masters and hopefully start my Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in epidemiology to
become a doctor of the profession.