Actually, it may be a surprise to many people but I do not have a degree in public health. I was actually working on a PhD in demography and sociology. I came across a book about the Titanic – a book called The Night to Remember – but as I’m flipping through it it’s talking about the survivors so I was like well this is interesting… the survivors… and it was talking about survivors as a function of the class of ticket they had and it showed that first class ticketed women almost all of them survive… 73% of the second class ticketed women survive only about half of the third class ticketed women survive and I found that fascinating because I was thinking about issues around social class I was thinking about how do you measure the well-being of a community… and I started learning about these health measures and then to find that that pattern where social status matter even when something like this occurs and so I just started thinking about that… and as I started thinking more about it thinking about well, what does it all mean for a sociologist and a demographer? So, I wander into the school of public health and I just start talking to people what is this about and it turns out that one of faculty members happened to be sitting in his office with the door open and I just wandered in and started asking him what public health was all about and he started describing it and I said this is it these are my people this is what I should be doing if I knew this existed this is what I’d be doing
