Seven Hills Article

Young Alumni Award Interview – Lily Yan ’06 Last fall, the Alumni and Development Office instituted a new award, given annually to an alumna or alumnus under the age of 40 years old who has achieved excellence in his or her chosen pursuits since graduating from Seven Hills.

In fall 2018, a committee made up of Seven Hills faculty and administrators selected Lily Yan ’06 as the inaugural winner of the Young Alumni Award. Lily graduated from Seven Hills in 2006 and continued her studies at Yale University, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

After college, she volunteered with AmeriCorps for a year, working as a depression case manager in the Bronx. Lily went on to earn her M.D. from Stanford University. During medical school, she lived for a year in Zambia as a recipient of the Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship.

Lily lives in Boston, where she is in the midst of her medical residency in Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center and is earning a Master’s degree in health systems research at Boston University’s School of Public Health. She has published numerous peerYoung Alumni Award Winner Lily Yan reviewed articles during her studies. For her commitment to public health and using her education to better help underserved populations, the school is proud to honor Lily.

SL: Lily, please tell us about your residency and master’s programs and work in health care.

My residency program is unique in that it combines clinical medicine (taking care of patients one-on-one) with public health (thinking about population level issues through the master’s degree and preventive medicine practicum experiences). In the hospital, I have the great privilege of caring for the underserved, such as immigrants and people who have stigmatized conditions like substance use disorder. My refugee patients hold a particularly soft spot in my heart—they’re fleeing political persecution, LGBTQ based violence, and tragic socio-political situations.

But they are so resilient. Here, half-way around the world, they integrate into communities, find jobs, and find healing. I’m thinking of one young woman specifically-- our first few visits together she would cry for almost the whole time, recounting her daily nightmares and flashbacks from being beaten by the police in her home country. Slowly, very slowly, we were able to treat her post-traumatic stress disorder and help her feel safer. A year later, she smiled for the first time in my clinic room. Now she’s joined a church, found friends, and works full time. It’s so humbling and an honor to accompany my patients on their journey to wellness.

The classes in the school of public health are a nice counterpoint to the intensity and immediacy of patient care. My master’s program focuses on the 10,000-foot view, looking at health systems and all the parts of these complicated machines that do and do not work well together. It’s helped me refine my research skills with things like econometric methods (a lot of fancy math that I still don’t fully understand) and implementation science (trying to figure out why treatments we know work aren’t fully adopted). It’s been a little odd to switch back and forth between the clinical setting where I’m the person with the authority as the physician, to the classroom where as a student I often know very little. But it keeps me on my toes!

SL: What inspired you to pursue a career in medicine and public health?

I grew up interested in science. In kindergarten, we would get these coins if we helped out with cleaning up the classroom, or passing out papers for the teacher. We could then use the coins to “buy” different toys at different price points, like 1 coin for a bouncy ball or 5 coins for a jump rope. When I had amassed some ridiculous number of coins (I think it was 50) the first thing I bought was a microscope—and it actually worked! I used to spend hours looking at leaves, dirt, water droplets under that thing. My parents are also basic biology research scientists, so our dinner table conversations revolved around experiments and models.

It wasn’t until high school that I started thinking about topics like social justice and societal values and who was in power and why. My teachers at Seven Hills really pushed me to think beyond the boundaries of my life, beyond the boundaries of Cincinnati, beyond the boundaries of even the US. In particular, both Mr. [David] Abineri and Mr. [Bob] Turansky were so essential to developing my critical thinking, healthy skepticism of the status quo, and interest in the disenfranchised. And then I started reading Naomi Klein, became a vegetarian, and only bought clothing at thrift shops to minimize my contribution to sweatshop labor (so, basically an insufferable teenager).

Later in college, when I was trying to figure out a way of combining my interest in science with social justice, medicine and public health were obvious paths forward. Experiences like volunteering at the student-run free clinic in contraceptive education and conducting memory exercises as a hospital volunteer cemented my interest in becoming a doctor.

SL: Which teachers, classes, or activities at Seven Hills influenced your academic and career paths?

There are so many people to credit, I don’t know where to start. Mr. Abineri’s calculus and physics classes taught me how to think for myself. He was so skilled in teaching us the framework, but then expecting that we would be able to take the final leap. And it was a gift to us, to let us have that “aha!” moment when you figure out a proof or take that last step to the answer.

Mrs. [Linda] Ford’s chemistry class taught me curiosity, and wonder. My favorite chemistry display was the day she played “The Rainbow Connection” sung by Kermit the Frog, and then successively lit 7 petri dishes with 7 different metals on fire, each one burning a color of the rainbow.

Mr. [Bob] Turansky’s modern history and political theory class taught me to look for the people who are missing, who are at the margins. He taught me to always question existing power structures, to ask why are things the way they are, and who benefits from the current system.

This has served me well in activism and in my professional interests.

Mr. [Nate] Gleiner’s English class taught me to be kinder to myself. I was an angsty teenager (no one understood me! Dramatic sigh!), and he always took me seriously. In reading poetry by e.e. cummings and Elizabeth Barret Browning, I found some measure of calm.

SL: Where do you see yourself professionally in the next 10 years? Twenty-five years from now?

I plan on combining patient care with global health research. I want to improve health systems (hospitals, clinics, people, medications) in low-middle income countries so that they take better care of people with chronic health problems, like high blood pressure, heart disease, and lung disease. In global health, there’s been great progress for HIV/AIDS care and infectious diseases, but as people live longer, there’s going to be this huge wave of folks who need regular medical visits and access to medications that aren’t quite set up yet. So in ten years, I hope to be working on these issues.

In twenty-five years—that’s hard to say. When I ask my mentors how they ended up where they are, the path is often meandering. Yes, there is hard work and drive, but there’s also a fair bit of luck and circumstance.

SL: How has giving back to the community, both locally and globally, impacted your life?

Having a mission, thinking and working on issues of inequity and injustice, can be a lifeline in dark times. Residency is tough, especially in the hospital. You’re working 80-hour weeks, seeing people at their most vulnerable, having family meetings where years of tension between siblings and children and parents come spilling out in high-octane situations. Decisions have to be made about whether a father’s dementia is too advanced for him to go home, or who will support a sister in her path to sobriety. It’s physically and emotionally exhausting.

But knowing that I’m working with under-served patients, with some of the most marginalized people in our society, makes it worth it. One of the lessons Seven Hills taught me was that to really make a difference and enact change, that has to be your full-time job (and my teachers modeled this every day with us in the classroom). It can’t be a volunteer thing or a weekends and evening thing—if it’s worth pursuing, it’s worth your full, undivided attention.

SL: You have a rich, varied career background. What is something – a memory, a story, a lesson – that stands out for you?

In high school, I was a painfully shy introvert. I was one of seven Asian Americans in the entire Upper School, didn’t know how to talk to people in large groups, and really lacked confidence in expressing my ideas. One day, during a school assembly, one of the Middle School English teachers talked about a city amendment up for public vote, that would remove legal language that protected LGBTQ residents of Cincinnati from employment and housing discrimination. He shared that he would be participating in canvassing door-to-door to block the passage of this amendment, and uphold rights for LGBTQ residents. He ended by inviting students to join in the effort. Now, walking up to people’s homes, talking to strangers, and trying to convince them to vote is not an introvert’s idea of a good time. But something about his tone—so earnest, so focused—intrigued me, so I signed up.

The effort was organized in a small match-box of an office downtown. We split into groups, and drove off to our respective neighborhoods, where we paired off to knock on people’s doors.

The first house we approached, I was very nervous: nervous about walking up to a stranger’s house, nervous about discussing LGBTQ rights in a conservative state, nervous about speaking clearly on a somewhat confusing amendment.

I took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell.

A middle-aged woman opened the door, and I launched into my two-minute spiel. She patiently listened, we had a bit of a back and forth conversation, and she ultimately agreed to vote against the amendment! After the door closed, I realized that was much easier than I had thought. With each additional door knock, and each additional conversation, I slowly gained confidence, with the help of our script, and my canvassing partner.

At the end of that day, I was exhilarated. I had spoken to dozens of people, and convinced some of them to vote to protect LGBTQ rights! I ended up volunteering for multiple weekends, and when the public vote finally happened, we won! The amendment was not passed, and the city constitution kept the legal protections.

This experience taught me the power of practice. Getting better at speaking to strangers and overcoming my shyness was just a matter of practice. The more I just repeated the act of knocking on doors and talking with people, the easier it became.

SL: What advice do you have for Seven Hills students interested in pursuing a career in public health?

First, recognize the incredible privilege you have as a student attending an elite school like Seven Hills, living in one of the most developed nations on earth. Seven Hills students and

alumni (myself included) are so lucky to have teachers that care about our growth and the resources to make it all happen. There may be other privileges you enjoy—your race, your sex, your gender orientation, your family’s socioeconomic status and networks—that have given you tools to navigate life. The point is not to feel guilty about these things, but to realize that not everyone gets this head start, gets this well-equipped backpack of tools. This will help you have a more successful career in public health, if you understand that different people will need different amounts of help to get them to the same place (equity).

Second, get training in hard skills. Take classes in coding (python, R), quantitative methods, qualitative methods, statistics, and cost-effective methods. The public health aspect comes from applying these methods to big important problems. Take classes in writing, read “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White and “On Writing Well” by Zinsser. I would also include management as a hard skill, as it should be explicitly taught and learned, instead of something people just “pick up on the job.” Seek out opportunities to learn about management styles, take courses at the business school, and learn the finer details of operationalization, because public health is a team-based sport.

Lastly, talk to as many people as you can through informational interviews. If you have an inkling of the kind of job you want in public health, look up people around you who have that job, see if any of your friends’ parents work in those fields, and take them out for coffee, or ask them for a 20-minute phone call. This can be intimidating as a student, but most people are happy to talk to a young person who is excited about their field. I have been amazed again and again by how gracious people are with their time. There is an etiquette to informational interviews: you should work around that person’s schedule, you should have a list of prepared questions and be clear about what you want to get out of the conversation beyond “learning what you do at work,” and you should offer something like buying them coffee as a way to thank them for their time. This is the best way to get insider knowledge about a career in public health, or really any career, ahead of time.