To all those who listened to me gripe about what i want to do with my life...

well,
basically i am working as a neonatal nurse which i really do love but don't see myself doing forever. i knew that if i did grad school now would be a good time as i was single and living at home. i had a hard time deciding exactly what role i would eventually want to take, and i wanted a degree that was versatile. i KNEW that i did not want to be an NP due to the fact that i wanted a job evenutally with less liability and i did not want that role in the NICU. I have always liked the ideas of health promotion, research, and patient teaching. when i mentioned this to someone they asked whether i had considered a MPH. I was taking masters of public administration courses at the time and while some were interesting for the most part i was not enjoying them. i also considered some of the other degrees you mentioned but realized that i really wasn't interested in that content, while with the MPH degree when i looked at the classes they still appealed to my nursing heart .
to tell you the truth, i am not sure what exact job i want to do after this degree. but, a lot of people told me that if you pick a graduate program that interests you regardless, a lot of other stuff falls into place. i know that some of the careers for mph graduates intrigue me, such as researcher, health educator, health consultant. i feel that it is versatile in that i could go in many directions afterward.
in terms of money, knowing me the job that i would like would probably pay peanuts; however, i have several family members in such areas as pharmaceutical research and marketing who work with graduates of my program and they have lucrative careers.
i am not sure how it works in terms of where you get your MPH, but i will tell you that i would rather have gone to a lesser known (and less expensive!) school near me if it had an 11 month MPH with the focus on neonatal/maternal that JHU did; that was what made it my number one choice, not really the ranking thing, although that of course is a nice bonus. my concetration will be either women's and reproductive health or child health, or a mix of the two maybe.
these are my thoughts on it, and some people may disagree on some points, but bottom line it was a program that i got excited about, so that was what made the decision for me . t.