Practicum Course Offerings

YSPH’s practicum courses provide opportunities to work on real world problems and projects with community partners. These courses not only provide students with hands-on practice experience but also help them jumpstart their careers in public health. (See Yale Course Search for prerequisites and full course descriptions.)

While courses are subject to changing and can be viewed here, below are descriptions of practicum courses that may be used to fulfill the APE if your internship does not:

This course provides students with a wide-range of public health practice experience within the framework of equitable community engagement. Students choose field placements in settings that afford the opportunity to apply public health concepts and competencies relevant to the students’ areas of specialization. Emphasis is placed on placements with community-based organizations and other public health service settings such as local or state health departments, where students work on actual public health problems and issues.

In the course, interdisciplinary student teams carry out applied projects at the intersection of climate justice, law and public policy, and public health. Each team works with a partner organization (e.g., state agency, community organization, other nongovernmental organization) to study, design, and implement a project, typically through community-based participatory research practices. The course affords the opportunity to have a real-world impact by applying concepts and competencies learned in the classroom. This course should be of interest to graduate and professional students across the University and is open to Yale College juniors and seniors. In addition, this course is one of the options available to students to fulfill the practice requirement for the MPH degree at YSPH and the capstone requirement for the MEM degree at YSE. Students who plan to enroll must complete an application, which will be used to match each student with a clinic project. Check the course’s Canvas site or contact the instructor for more information.

This experiential learning course focusses on domestic and transnational health justice work and is committed to addressing health equity and the fundamental social causes of disease. It emphases power-building and political economy, instead of viewing health as a technocratic field where issues are resolved through application of expertise alone.

The Health Policy or Health Care Management Practicum provides students with experience in either a hospital management/administration or policy. Students can take one of two sections of this practicum course:

• The Health Care Management Practicum (section 1) enables students to apply their academic and practical knowledge of business and healthcare to challenges and opportunities facing a hospital or other health provider organization under the guidance of a preceptor.
• The Health Policy Practicum (section 2) allows students to work on current state and/or local health policy issues while placed with state and/or local legislative or executive agency policy makers, or with senior staff at a nonprofit health policy or advocacy group.

This course is designed for students who wish to deepen their practice-based learning in health policy and develop additional research, communication, and advocacy skills through continuing work in a particular practicum placement and/or on a particular health policy topic. Students are placed with state and/or local legislative or executive agency policy makers, or with senior staff at nonprofit health policy or advocacy groups