Jeremy Cheng Ling Jie (MPH ’20)
Jeremy trained as a nurse to care for people one patient at a time. A Master of Public Health at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health taught him to care for populations, and set a bedside nurse on the path to becoming a nurse scientist specialising in health economics and outcomes research at the University of Oxford.
As a Senior Staff Nurse at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, I spent four years close enough to my patients to see the things no chart could capture: what frightened them, what gave them hope, and how they were really coping when no one was measuring it. Yet when decisions were made about their care, what to fund, what to prioritise, and what counted as “getting better”, that knowledge almost never reached the room. I wanted to change whose experience gets counted. I simply did not yet know that public health was the way to do it.
Walking away from the wards to become a student again in the Master of Public Health (MPH) programme at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health was the most daunting decision of my career. I was older than I thought a student should be, and further from the classroom than I liked to admit. What I discovered is that the MPH does not expect you to arrive fully formed. It helps form you. It gave me a new way of seeing: how to turn the messy realities of human lives into evidence strong enough to shift policy, without losing sight of the person behind the number.
The moment I knew something in me had changed came with my Master’s thesis. Guided by my Thesis and Academic advisor, Associate Professor Luo Nan, a world authority on quality-of-life measurement, what began as a student project became my first paper in Value in Health and, to my disbelief, was named an ISPOR Editor’s Choice. I still remember the surreal feeling of seeing my name in print, and realising that the nurse who had doubted he belonged in a classroom had quietly become a scientist.
If I am honest, the degree gave me skills, but it was the people who gave me a future. Associate Professor Luo saw a researcher in me long before I could see one in myself, and was generous enough to wait for me to catch up. That is the quiet magic of this School: you are not processed through it; you are taken seriously, treated as a colleague in the making, and invested in by people who genuinely want you to outgrow them. I came hoping to learn a few methods. I left with a mentor, a vocation, and a community I still call home.
That belief carried me further than I had dared to plan, through a PhD and on to the University of Oxford, where I now work on the health economics of mothers and newborns. But the further I travel, the clearer my purpose becomes. I became a nurse to care for people one at a time. Public health taught me to care for them by the thousand. What I want most now is to help the next generation of clinicians and scientists do the same. The greatest gift my mentors gave me was their belief in me, and belief is meant to be passed on.
So, if you are reading this from a crossroads of your own, as a nurse, clinician, or practitioner wondering whether your experience could matter on a larger stage, let me tell you what I wish someone had told me: you are not too late, and you are not too far behind. The doubt you feel is not a sign that you should not go. It is what it feels like to stand at the edge of something bigger than yourself. Step forward. The School will meet you there, and the person you become is someone your patients, and your younger self, would be proud of.
