Public Health Fellowships
Give UAlbany an Edge
By Paul Grondahl

Tony Torres, assistant dean for Student Affairs at the School of Public Health, with Axelrod Fellows Amy Robbins, second from left, and Jessica Gaudy, right, and Hearst Fellow Martina Taylor. The young women hold three of the school's top graduate fellowships, all supported by private funds.

After she graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in human biology, Martina Taylor applied to schools of public health for graduate school. She was considering the University of Michigan, Tulane University, Emory University and the University of Texas. But she chose the University at Albany’s School of Public Health for one compelling reason: the Hearst fellowship.

“The Hearst fellowship was the deciding factor,” said Taylor, a first-year student in the master’s of public health program in the School of Public Health. Taylor, who grew up in a working-class family in Montego Bay, Jamaica, is this year’s Hearst Fellow.

She is a recipient of one of the premier fellowships offered by the School of Public Health, which has about 350 full- and part-time graduate students enrolled in master’s degree and doctoral programs. Private foundation grants like the Hearst Fellowship help the University attract the best and the brightest students to its graduate programs and remain competitive with other major public research universities and private universities with large endowments.

“As someone who goes on the road and recruits students to the School of Public Health, I can tell you these types of fellowships are invaluable,” said Tony Torres, an assistant to the dean for student affairs. “They often make the difference between a student choosing us over a competing school.

The University’s School of Public Health was formed in the mid-1980s and remains the only public university in New York State that offers an accredited M.P.H. program. There are 32 schools of public health nationwide, and Columbia University has the only other accredited program in the state. What also draws graduate students in public health to the University is its unique partnership with the New York State Department of Health, many of whose researchers teach courses on a part-time basis. All students also have the opportunity to complete a Department of Health internship alongside state health officials working on the most pressing issues of public health today.

Dean Jeryl Mumpower: Stipends Are the Difference in Attracting the Best Students The word “revolutionary” hardly seems adequate to describe the changes taking place at the University at Albany. Already highly respected, UAlbany is on a course to rank in the top tier of American public research universities. Jeryl Mumpower, UAlbany’s dean of graduate studies, puts himself in the shoes of graduate students to understand the dynamics of how they select institutions for graduate study. “Imagine you’re a top student and you’re trying to choose between two first-rate programs and one of the schools is offering a couple thousand dollars more in its stipend. That factor will weigh heavily for most students,” Mumpower said. That’s why Mumpower is watching the bottom line closely and working to continue nudging higher, little by little, the level of graduate student stipends. “We’ve worked very hard to make our stipends more and more competitive,” Mumpower said. Last year, the University’s mean stipend for graduate students was slightly more than $11,000, along with a full tuition waiver. It varies from field to field — with lower amounts in humanities and social sciences — while biomedical science stipends reach as high as $18,000 annually. “The level of the stipend is not reflective of a value judgment on the student, but on market forces and national trends,” Mumpower said. Currently, private foundation donations represent a small percentage of the total cost of graduate student stipends. But it’s a critical element that will become increasingly important in a time of dwindling state funding. “It’s clear we’ll need to increase levels of support that come from private sources if we’re going to be able to continue to improve the quality of the graduate programs we have here,” Mumpower said. “It’s essential to our overall strategy. We can’t run high-quality programs without providing stipends at a level that makes it possible to attract the best students.” Mumpower said he knows of no study that has attempted to assess the importance of stipend levels in attracting top prospects. “Yet the anecdotal evidence suggests that stipend levels certainly make a difference and practical considerations are weighed as well as intellectual measures,” Mumpower said. This effort is perhaps most important when trying to attract minority students, many of whom are financially in need and are also being recruited by other graduate schools. “Having competitive stipends is a key element in attracting the best high-caliber students, which in turn directly and indirectly affects the rankings and the ratings of our graduate programs nationally,” Mumpower said. “It’s all connected. And it also can eventually reflect in a positive way on the University, because great students go on to accomplish great things.” — Paul Grondahl

The partnership with the state Department of Health was another critical factor in Taylor’s decision to come to the University from Stanford, which she attended on an academic scholarship. “My goal is to become a medical doctor and to practice in an under-served community. My perspective on medicine comes from growing up in a developing country,” she said.

Taylor’s academic and career goals, along with a strong application and essay, won her the Hearst fellowship, which carries a full tuition waiver and $10,000 stipend. Taylor’s fellowship is paid for through a grant from The Hearst Foundation, an arm of the Hearst Corporation, a privately held, diversified media company that owns magazines, broadcast properties and newspapers, including the Albany Times Union.

“The stipend pays all my rent and utilities so that I don’t have to work. I’m freed up to concentrate solely on graduate school,” said Taylor, whose family moved to the Bronx in 1990 in search of educational opportunities for their children.

Jessica Gaudy, whose home is in Pittsford, N.Y., outside Rochester, didn’t have far to travel to attend the University. Gaudy graduated magna cum laude and was on the dean’s list at Syracuse University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree with a major in psychology and minor in biology. A first-year student in the M.P.H. program who plans to become a physician, Gaudy was selected as an Axelrod Fellow this year. The fellowship is named for the late New York State Health Commissioner Dr. David Axelrod.

“I was attracted to the University because of its outstanding reputation and I wanted to be in the state capital, where a lot of important health legislation is debated. The fellowship clinched it,” said Gaudy, who received a full tuition waiver and a $12,000 stipend. The Axelrod fellowship brought Gaudy to UAlbany instead of to Columbia University, where she was accepted and had originally planned to attend.

Gaudy is specializing in health-policy management and has an internship at the state Health Department’s patient safety center in which she analyzes data on pediatric outcomes at hospitals with information generated through New York’s mandatory reporting system.

Amy Robbins is the other Axelrod Fellow this year, an honor that she received in the fall of 2001, but deferred so that she could work for a year with AmeriCorps. “It was a great privilege to receive the Axelrod fellowship, and they were very gracious in allowing me to defer it,” said Robbins, of Burnt Hills, N.Y., who earned her bachelor’s degree from Drew University with a major in biology. She’s a first-year M.P.H. student specializing in infectious disease and epidemiology. Robbins is still weighing whether to pursue a medical degree.

“Public health encompasses so much now,” Robbins said. “I’m looking forward to finding a position in the field where I can really make a difference.”

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