Once students enter a doctoral program in epidemiology, they begin to fulfill its coursework requirements. The core curriculum includes courses in epidemiologic research methods and evidence interpretation, biology and biostatistics. Students also have a number of elective credits with which to pusue topics related to their own research interests, such as perinatal epidemiology, environmental health or specific kinds of data analysis. Full-time students usually complete coursework in two years. During this time, students also select a research adviser and a few other faculty members who make up their doctoral committee.
Once students complete their coursework, their doctoral committee gives them their qualifying exam, sometimes called a comprehensive exam. This exam varies depending on the program, but it’s always designed to test students’ broad knowledge of epidemiology, to find the limits of their knowledge and to ensure that they are prepared to conceive and carry out original research in epidemiology. Some programs require students to give their committee a dissertation prospectus and to then defend it in an oral exam. Others require both written and oral exam components. Students who have passed their qualifying exam are called doctoral candidates.
After students advance to candidacy, they work with their adviser to refine their dissertation research question and to conduct the necessary research to answer it. This phase of the program is designed to take two to three years, but students who encounter problems in their research -- for example, not getting valid experimental data -- may take longer. Dissertation research is highly specific. UC Berkeley, for instance, posts a list of recent dissertation titles that indicates the focused nature of students’ research. Dissertations vary widely in length, but, as an example, the average epidemiology dissertation at the University of Minnesota between 2007 to 2013 was about 160 pages long, according to a study at FlowingData.com.
Most students in epidemiology doctoral programs receive a tuition waiver, health care coverage and a living stipend. To earn that living stipend, they work either as research assistants or teaching assistants, which can change from term to term. Teaching assistants might supervise laboratory sections of large lecture courses taught by faculty, or they might act as graders and guest lecturers in a faculty member’s classroom. Some research assistants work solely on their own research, while others assist their research adviser or another faculty member on a project related to their area of interest.