My job

In 1999 I graduated with an MSc in Community Health and Epidemiology (I was a late bloomer, career-wise). Somewhere around let’s say 2009, although I actually have no idea when it was, someone introduced me as an epidemiologist. After the meeting I said to the person, “Can I call myself that?” I had never done so because that had never been, and still isn’t, my job title, unlike some positions at provincial health units and Health Canada where the job descriptions were, and still are, very different from mine. 

“Of course you can,” she replied. You have a graduate degree in epidemiology and so it’s appropriate. After that, whilst still refraining from explicitly declaring I AM AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST, I would at meetings and conferences introduce myself as “an epidemiologist by training.” 

I think my wishy washiness in this area was justified. With the pandemic most people have finally heard of epidemiology and there’s no longer a need to explain that it has nothing to do with skin diseases or insects. But as another friend who was in the same graduate program as me said the other day, “Should we be calling ourselves epidemiologists? After listening to actual epidemiologists being interviewed about the pandemic, it seems like we really shouldn’t.” 

I agree. In our two-year program—which most of us took three years to complete, as we had a number of late bloomers who liked to stop and smell the roses instead of focusing exclusively on methods to control for confounding—we spent at most two or three classes learning about infectious disease epidemiology. Before the pandemic, like probably most of the civilized world, ACTUAL EPIDEMIOLOGISTS aside, I had never heard of R0 or bending the curve. An acquaintance said she would be interested in hearing my opinion on the origins of the virus. I told her I didn’t have one. I know next to nothing about viruses except that they’re extremely unpopular, whereas humans are BFF with plenty of bacteria and fungi.

You may be thinking at this point that I got my degree through an ad in the back of a magazine or some dubious online source. I assure you that is not the case. 

Most of our classes focused on research methods—like how to control for confounding, which remains a somewhat confusing topic for me to this day—and statistics, which also remains a somewhat confusing topic for me to this day. (Sidebar: I am not being modest or silly here. It seems like these things should be cut and dried, but I assure you that is not the case.) And although we may have learned how to conduct and analyze data from a case-control study to examine whether excess avocado consumption is associated with an increased risk of heart disease (which I really, really hope it isn’t, otherwise I will likely have a cardiac event any day now), I cannot tell you anything about heart disease—this also comes as a surprise to some people. If I was a cardiologist who studied epidemiology I probably could, but I am not a cardiologist. And now it appears that I am not really an epidemiologist either. It’s probably good that I’m working mostly from home these days—by minimizing my work-related encounters, perhaps I will not confound anybody’s expectations about what someone with a degree in epidemiology, but who is not AN ACTUAL EPIDEMIOLOGIST, does. And after five years have passed I will have reached the age when I can retire, at which point I plan to focus exclusively on over-consuming avocados and the other good things in life, public health messaging about “everything in moderation (except tobacco)” be damned.