Cambridge MPhil Health Policy Supplemental Essay Example: Boundary Case (Score 93)

This MPhil in Health Policy will sharpen the causal-inference and policy-evaluation skills my undergraduate work in Lima exposed as gaps. Analysing coastal health disparities taught me to map stakeholder interests, yet my methods remained descriptive; this course's quantitative core will let me move from pattern recognition to rigorous impact assessment. Where my personal statement traces my motivation arc, this field specifies how particular modules serve one aim: evidence-based policy design. 'Health Economics' and 'Policy Analysis and Evaluation' will equip me to model cost-effectiveness and apply difference-in-differences or synthetic-control methods—tools I lacked when drafting a comparative memo on MSc global health versus MPH pathways. For a forward project, I plan to evaluate Lima's decentralised health governance reforms using administrative data from regional health directorates. The key identification threat is non-random rollout timing across districts; I would exploit staggered adoption as a natural experiment while testing for pre-trend violations. The course's methods training is essential to making such analysis defensible.