Our guest today, Dr. Anne Steptoe, earned her BA in Classics and English at Harvard in 2009. She then worked for two years as a Health Policy Senior Analyst at Mass General Hospital and attended medical school at Brown. Along the way to her current position as a pediatrics resident at UNC Chapel Hill, she earned an MBA at Duke Fuqua and started her own social enterprise with a partner.

Can you tell us about your background?  Where did you grow up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:29]

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. There were about 2,000 families in the town and relationships really formed the fabric of the town. A sense of community has always driven me, which I attribute to my time there. In terms of my free time, I am now a North Carolinian – and there is amazing food here and some of the best craft brewing in the country. And of course basketball enthusiasm is in the water here.

How did you go from an undergrad degree in Classics and English in 2009 to starting med school in 2011? [2:47]

I knew a couple of things at the start of college. I loved Latin, one of my singular passions in high school, and I was not done studying that. I also loved to read and wanted to spend my college years doing more of that. I didn’t see myself as a professor, which would have been a typical pathway for someone with my majors, so I wanted to be a student for a bit longer but needed professional experiences to answer the question of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I got interested in public policy, an obvious extension of the community idea, and had some internships on Capitol Hill. I sought out the most interesting people in our office, and as it turns out I was most drawn to the health policy legislative aide. I loved that she would be on the phone with a single mom walking her through how to sign her child up for CHIP in the morning, and then in the afternoon be in these huge plenary sessions about what the future of the entire healthcare system looks like. The micro and macro look at change was really fascinating to me.

This still didn’t get me to med school, though. I actually thought med school was the last path I would follow, since I had to be hospitalized as a 7-8 year old and thought doctors were the worst. But another summer I had been given a small grant to go to West Virginia to ask, what in retrospect seems like an arrogant question, about the disconnect between health policy on obesity vs what was happening on the ground. West Virginia has one of the worst obesity rates in the country. The reason I say the question was arrogant was because it was almost as if, “What are those pesky doctors doing messing up the beautiful portrait we have of how an ideal healthcare system should work?”

I did some qualitative research in a healthcare center in West Virginia, and after 1.5 days there realized we weren’t asking the right questions. There is a huge disconnect with people enthused about national level policies, but who don’t have the experience of healthcare on the ground. I was struck by how little I knew about how healthcare functioned, which was the turning point to med school for me. I was introduced to the concept of a doctor as a change agent in the community. Providers were stepping in as entrepreneurs in their communities in the absence of policy. From there I was hooked.

I was lucky enough to have figured this out at the end of my sophomore year so I had enough intro science classes that I was able to stack a few ex...