EIS = the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the CDC program for training people in applied epidemiology. Sounds dry, yeah? Disease sleuthing is the better name for it, things like investigating food outbreaks, for example listeria in ricotta cheese a week ago. There's not a lot of first-person accounts of the application process, though, which makes it a mite more harrowing.
This summer was spent gathering letters of recommendation, filling out the online forms (describe every job, volunteer experience, and educational activity you've ever done), and now is the waiting.
Wait wait wait.
Check online status of submission.
Where's my license? WHERE?? Oh, there it is.
Wait wait wait.
Call. Find out where the last bit of paperwork got lost in the stacks.
Wait.
Check online status of submission. Oh goody, now it's being reviewed.
Wait wait wait.
Text other applicants compulsively, commiserate about the misery of not being rejected upfront.
Obviously from this post, I applied.
It's a long shot for me. I'm still working on my masters in public health and have less field experience than most candidates. Also, I'm a veterinarian. This is both good and bad. There have been veterinarians in EIS (Pappaioanou, 2003, a great article if you are a DVM obsessing over your EIS application, as is this powerpoint), but the majority of officers appointed are human medical doctors who have already done a residency.
Still, I got to attend the EIS conference this spring, and it was full of fascinating people and such scope for practicing communication AND population medicine that I would be a fool not to try to get in. It's obscure outside the sphere of public health, though, and I hadn't even heard of it until I was partway through vet school.
Now, of course, they've made a nice movie (Contagion) with Kate Winslet as the EIS officer, and the service has become better known (by the handle: You know that movie with Kate Winslet and people dying? No, not the one with a boat).
Correspondingly, the applicant pool has doubled.
Thanks, Hollywood *shakes fist*
wait wait wait
Anyone have a good list of fidgeting techniques?
