Public Health
Hours: 15 credits, all completed with grades of C or better

The public health minor is a 15-credit program that allows pre-professional students to acquire public health knowledge that is complementary to their chosen career path. It is specifically designed for students going into careers other than public health who can benefit from public health knowledge in the delivery of their services. A few examples of these careers include medicine, occupational therapy, physician assistant, nursing, dentistry, nutritional sciences, health education, psychology and environmental engineering.

For students in the College of Public Health and Health Professions, successful completion of this minor satisfies the 9-credit college elective requirement and six credits of general elective credit. Therefore, no additional hours beyond 120 are required for graduation with a minor in public health.

Prerequisites for the minor include senior status (90+ credits), overall GPA of 3.0 and completion of general college biology, psychology or sociology, and statistics (STA 2023) with a 3.0 GPA. The minor requires 15 hours of specific graduate level public health course work.

Students interested in this minor can obtain an application and a list of appropriate coursework that begins in the senior year from the dean's office (HPNP, Room 4104A).

Please note: Students interested in public health as a career should explore the combined-degree program rather than the minor.

Students have two options for completing this minor.

Required Courses

Option 1: The Council on Education for Public Health has delineated five core areas of knowledge considered critical for all public health students: biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health sciences, health services administration, and social and behavioral sciences. Most students fulfill the 15-credit minor by completing the five public health core courses below.

Option 2: Students must complete the 3-credit junior level course Public Health Concepts (PHC 4101), which is a survey course that introduces them to the different areas of contemporary issues in public helath. In their senior year, students complete four of the five core graduate-level public health courses listed under Option 1.

Counting Credits: For the vast majority of students, the graduate-level credits taken for the public health minor will count toward fulfillment of undergraduate degree requirements, and, therefore, will not count toward a UF graduate degree. If a student were to change his or her career path to public health while still an undergraduate, he or she would need to apply and to be accepted to the combined degree program or take additional credits above and beyond those counted for the undergraduate major to allow the public health core coursework to count toward the Master of Public Health degree. (If students are interested in the MPH degree with a concentration in biostatistics, they should plan to take two semesters of college-level calculus while an undergraduate; if the interest is environmental health, they should plan to take two semesters of college biology and two semesters of college chemistry. Organic chemistry is recommended but is not required for environmental health.