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| Photo credit: NPR Morning Edition* |
Growing up poor in rural Iowa, I never dreamed that at I
would graduate from both Harvard Medical School and Harvard Kennedy School of
Government. I always did well in school
but growing up with divorced parents who had no higher education and valued making
due with what you had, I was discouraged from pursuing my dream of becoming a
doctor. My high school guidance
counselor agreed. When I met with her to discuss options for my future, she
asked, “What do you want to do with your life”? I said that I wanted to be a
doctor. She laughed and told me I, “needed
to find something more suitable to do,” and went on to suggest working in a
local factory since (before the recession) they offered stable work and
benefits.
I ultimately did work in one such factory to save money to move
away for college. If I didn’t have
support in my hometown, I planned to escape so at least no one would hold me
back. My first move outside of Iowa was
to Minneapolis, Minnesota where I attended one year of college majoring in
psychology. The decision to study
psychology grew out of an understanding that if everyone told me I’d never be a
doctor, maybe it was true. I reasoned
that I could still help people by doing something that required less school,
like being a psychologist or counselor. The
school I attended was a religious school that turned out to be a poor fit given
that I found some of the doctrine and actions of officials and attendees of the
school morally questionable. Rather than
realize that another college might be a better fit, I thought that maybe
everyone had been right. Maybe I really wasn’t cut out for college. Because I feared becoming another unskilled
worker and falling into the same traps that many of my impoverished relatives
had, I decided to go to culinary school.
I loved to cook and felt that this would provide a somewhat better
quality of life than no training at all.
That fall, I registered for the accelerated two-year degree program at
Le Cordon Bleu, Minneapolis/St. Paul (this was before locations popped up all
over the United States). While I did love cooking, halfway through the program, I knew that if I got to the end of my life and looked back, I’d regret never trying to become a
doctor.
This was around the time my culinary classmates and I
started planning for our final internships.
After some research and a number of phone interviews, I landed an
internship at Chez Panisse, Alice Water’s famous restaurant, in Berkeley,
California. Shortly thereafter, I found
a pre-medical program at a Northern California school, Humboldt State
University (one of the California State Universities), I could afford with
minimal loans once I got in-state residency status.
Once I got to Berkeley and started my internship at Chez
Panisse, I knew Northern California was the place for me. It was the only place I’d ever been that felt
like home. However, it was very
different from anything I’d experienced before. At Chez Panisse, menus were decided each day
based on what local people brought to the back door from their farms and
gardens and on what the farmer’s markets had to offer. I’d never tasted or seen such fresh,
delicious food! Growing up in Iowa, I’d
seen plenty of farms with miles of scientifically-engineered monoculture and
worked picking produce in the summers alongside recent immigrants, but this was
totally different. I also learned about
the politics of food and the cultural importance of sitting down with others
over a meal. All of this was a
revelation.
Later, to support myself while attending college at Humboldt
State, I utilized my culinary skills for a variety of jobs – managing and
teaching at a cooking school in a retail outlet (like a privately-owned
Williams Sonoma-type store), being on-call for local restaurants in need of
last-minute chefs and eventually helping start a culinary and hospitality
program at the local community college where I became associate faculty. I also
volunteered to do cooking demonstrations at the Arcata Farmer’s Market
(probably the most fun farmer’s market I’ve been to) to show people what to do
with all that glut of zucchini or the fill-in-the-blank vegetable they’d never
seen before. Around this same time, I undertook self-study in nutrition and
poured through books and scientific databases to try to figure out what foods
and ways of eating were healthy and experimented with cooking techniques to
turn that science and local produce into delicious, healthy food.
I had also taken up running in my free time and transformed
myself from the overweight kid with high blood pressure who grew up eating
McDonald’s and had soda as a go-to beverage to a healthy, active person (with
normal blood pressure) who viewed their body in a new and positive light. It was while teaching cooking classes that
were in no way focused on healthy eating that people asked questions here and
there about how they could eat to better control blood sugar or make foods safe
for those with celiac disease. As time
went by, students came back to me with stories about no longer needing to be on
insulin, improving their cholesterol and losing weight and feeling good without
being hungry all the time. I began
teaching healthy cooking classes that were oversubscribed by 200-300%. This was proof that people didn’t dislike
healthy food – they just disliked bad-tasting food.
Fast-forwarding a bit…it wasn’t until I was in my first
months at Harvard Medical School that I realized how entrenched the idea was
that it was “pointless to waste time counseling patients about diet and
exercise because they’re never going to change.” I had seen first-hand that this wasn’t the
case. This realization is what steered
my medical career toward combining what I knew about nutrition and cooking with being active with primary care medicine focused on caring for those in
underserved communities. While not
discussed in detail in this autobiographical sketch, I also spent a significant
amount of time in college focused on helping other kids from underserved
backgrounds learn the skills needed to apply, and matriculate, to college. Working with the underserved is not only a
passion of mine, but also cathartic in the sense that my own background, while
I wouldn’t wish it on others, was not for naught. It has served as a great resource for
understanding the nutrition and social problems rampant in underserved
communities in the U.S. It has also
helped me to be a better doctor.
Just knowing about medicine, nutrition and the problems of
the underserved wasn’t enough. While in medical school, I elected to take an extra year to obtain a master’s degree in public policy/administration from
the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and do concurrent leadership training
through the Zuckerman Fellowship. These
experiences helped me learn how to navigate political and social systems to
translate knowledge into making social changes for the better.
At the end of June 2014, I finished internal medicine residency at the
Harvard-Cambridge Health Alliance Internal Medicine Residency Program along with other activities in the Boston area including teaching nutrition at Harvard Medical
School and serving as Co-leader for the Harvard Chapter of Primary Care Progress, a
grassroots organization focused on innovation, education and research in
primary care. A highlight of the Boston chapter of my life was being awarded an honorable mention for Food Hero by the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts for, "individuals and organizations with a lasting and significant commitment to the fair, healthy and sustainable food culture in the city."
The current chapter in life has brought me back to California for a post-doctoral research fellowship in cardiovascular disease prevention and a master's degree in epidemiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. I am also board certified in internal medicine and practice primary care at a county safety-net clinic that treats underserved patients. In November 2015, I was elected to serve on the Board of Directors for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
A more detailed version of my story is featured in Hoda Kotb's book Where We Belong: Stories That Show Us the Way.
Curriculum Vitae
The current chapter in life has brought me back to California for a post-doctoral research fellowship in cardiovascular disease prevention and a master's degree in epidemiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. I am also board certified in internal medicine and practice primary care at a county safety-net clinic that treats underserved patients. In November 2015, I was elected to serve on the Board of Directors for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
A more detailed version of my story is featured in Hoda Kotb's book Where We Belong: Stories That Show Us the Way.
Curriculum Vitae
*Photo credit: NPR Morning Edition http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89883788
