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Fill out your student information, and look at the degree requirements summary. This part shows how you intend to meet the graduation requirements for the degree. You will have to show how you completed the pre-req courses, core courses, focus area courses, other elective courses, and culminating requirements. You will total the credits you have taken, transferred, or waived, based on your entries on the subsequent pages.

Please read the notes on this page carefully. You have to determine how you will meet the 90 72 credit minimum while not exceeding the transfer limit.

Students must have taken the public health master's level core courses (or an equivalent curriculum), with a B or better grade. Show where you took the courses and what grade you received. If you haven't taken these courses yet, please look whether your experience in public health might allow you to waive that course. Please see the Prior Learning section below for information on how to document that.

If you need to take these courses, you can do it at USF or you can do it at another accredited university in your home state. We will need to see your transcripts to verify this.

 Please note that these courses are not counted as part of the 9072-credit DrPH program of study.

The core courses are divided into three clusters. You need to keep track of whether you are taking the course during your admission to the DrPH program, whether you have taken courses you can transfer in to the degree, or whether you can waive any of these because of your prior learning and experience. There are three separate columns for keeping track of this. If you are transferring in a course, you must have received a B or better.

You must document a set of courses that will constitute your focus area for 29 credits. The focus area can be an area of study that you completed in your master's program and are continuing to work on in your doctoral program, or it can be a new area of public health knowledge and skills that you would like to develop. If you are choosing a new area of study, you must consider which courses are available online. A good method is looking at the courses listed on the program of study for our online programs, which can be found here: http://health.usf.edu/publichealth/onlineprograms/

The focus area courses can be either transferred in from your master's degree, taken at USF while admitted to the DrPH, or taken from another university and transferred into this program (if approved by your advisor).

There are no required elective courses in the DrPH. However, if you transfer or waive a significant number of courses, you may have to add credit hours to achieve the 90 credits required. If so, you can enter those courses here.

There are three culminating requirements for the DrPH degree. More information on each of these can be found here: Complete the DrPH requirements

• Written qualifying exam
• Practice-based field study (9 credit hours of PHC 7908 Specialized Study)
• Practice‐based dissertation (9 credit hours of PHC 7980 Dissertation)

You will first complete the POS form with just your Faculty Advisor. Once you and your advisor agree on this plan, please submit a copy to the program director. After you form a dissertation committee, your committee members will need to also approve this plan and sign the form.