The Call to Heal Deriving Satisfaction from Helping Others: Sam Takvorian ’99 hroughout his life, Sam Takvorian ’99, a fourth year Harvard medical student, says his eyes have been opened to people with needs that are not being met. This happened when he was a student at Fenn, and his history teacher, Jill Guzzi, once asked her students to sit in a semi-circle around her. She asked the first boys who arrived to sit in chairs, and the last ones to sit on the floor. Jill gave no explanation for the seating, but proceeded to teach the class, acknowledging the boys in the chairs and soliciting their comments while subtly dismissing or ignoring the boys on the floor.
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At the end Jill asked her students how they felt about what had just happened. While the boys on the floor said they didn’t think she listened to them, the ones in the chairs said they had no idea the boys on the floor felt that way. “Wow,” Sam declares, looking back at that moment. “She wanted to show us what systematic discrimination was like by making it real. I’ll never forget that class.” When Sam was at Phillips Andover Academy, he spent a month between his junior and senior years in Ghana, volunteering at a rural health center. He shadowed the nurses and doctors, and helped them set up temporary prenatal clinics in isolated villages. “I was only another set of arms,” he says, “but I really wished I could come back when I had the skills to be hands-on.” The experience “altered my perception of what I wanted to do,” Sam says. He had grown up being exposed to medicine—his father is an oncologist and his mother, a rheumatologist—and to the value of service. Mike Potsaid, who oversees Fenn’s community service efforts, recalls that “Sam was my ‘go to’ guy,” adding that “if I needed someone to help me out with a project, I’d call him, and despite how busy I knew he was, he
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would always say ‘yes’.” In high school, Sam says, the idea of a life of service “began to gel.” The momentum continued while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He became involved with the Roxbury Youth Initiative, an enrichment program for inner city kids. Sam was a counselor, then a director, and continued devoting time to the organization through his college years, growing more and more attached to the community. Following college, Sam did an AmeriCorps year at the Whittier Street
Sam on his wedding day with best man Andrew Montomery ’99
Health Center, working mostly on health care coordination for adult diabetes patients. That same year the Mass Health Care Reform was instituted, requiring everyone to have insurance. “We were on the front lines,” he says, “helping people enroll in the subsidized program.” That experience got him excited about health care policy, and he spent a year in Washington, D.C., with the Alliance, a small non-profit focused on policy, health education, and outreach. In D.C., he was close to “the pulse of American politics” and got a taste of health care policy on the federal level. The Alliance, a minithink tank, sought to make sure the country’s policy makers were educated in health care. Sam’s decision to pursue medicine did not come to him as “an ‘aha’ moment” but rather had been “brewing for a while.” As he approaches the end of medical school, he says these last few years have been an “intense” time in his life. Having completed a residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, rotating among surgery, pediatrics, and other specialties, he spent several months doing research this year at the Harvard Business School, where he explored how to drive a health care delivery system with a goal of prioritizing patient value. He worked with