Practicum Course Offerings

YSPH’s practicum courses provide opportunities to work on real world problems and projects with community partners. In addition to the summer internship, 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.

This course is an innovative collaboration between Yale School of Public Health and Vermont Law School in which interdisciplinary student teams carry out applied projects at the intersection of climate justice, law and public policy, and public health. Teams work 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.

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