Please give a brief background on yourself and your career.
I am a cancer epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society. I hold a masters degree in epidemiology from Emory University. During graduate school, I interned at federal- and state-level public health organizations in a variety of areas, including HIV, disaster preparedness, and vector-borne diseases. I previously worked in the editorial department of a medical information service for clinicians, specifically in the area of infectious diseases. My degree from Wellesley is in English literature, and I was actually a transfer student from the University of Maryland, where I studied print journalism.
How has your career changed since you originally envisioned it at Wellesley? What other careers did you consider as a student?
In my early twenties, I completely rejected the idea that I would ever do anything in math or the sciences, in part because I grew up wanting to be a writer and an international correspondent. However, when I was studying abroad and interning at a London newspaper, a Wellesley College News editor e-mailed me and asked me to do a particularly sensitive story for the school paper. I’m paraphrasing here, but I was told I was asked to do it because I wrote very cut and dry pieces. This comment made me realize that I had trouble being anything other than cut and dry in my writing, which, although editors might not find fault with that deficiency, did not bode so well for my personal aspirations. It also made me realize that I actually might be more suited to winnowing the chaff for other writers’ works, so I began entertaining the idea of working in trade publishing. Of course, Boston is a little shorthanded when it comes to trade publishers, so I landed in academic publishing instead. I managed to graduate from Wellesley without ever having the slightest inkling that I’d ever become an epidemiologist. That epiphany came later, through my job at the medical information service.
How has Wellesley contributed to your career?
The dedication and pride that Wellesley students have in their studies and the point they make to celebrate each other’s work is truly impressive. That work ethic really stuck with me — especially through graduate school.
What is a typical work day or work week like for you?
I guess the most “high profile” responsibility that comes with my position is to produce estimates for the contemporary cancer burden (new cancer cases and deaths in the current year), which are useful because available cancer data lag three to four years behind the current year. I use statistical modeling techniques in SAS, R, and software from the National Cancer Institute to do this. However, this process only takes a few weeks each year to complete, and most of my days consist of proofreading manuscripts, running data requests, fact-checking items for colleagues, working on research projects, reading journal articles to keep up with the literature, and helping colleagues prepare for presentations. I’m currently preparing for the launch in December of a book and its associated website (canceratlas.cancer.org), on which I am a contributing editor. The estimates I produced for 2015 will be published in January, in a paper led by my director, Rebecca Siegel.
What piece of advice would you offer students looking to get into your area of interest and expertise?
If you are considering a career in epidemiology, find a graduate school that offers a solid methods-based, accredited curriculum. Also, several employers have preferred schools from which they recruit, so first pick out where you’d like to end up and whether you plan to be more of an applied epidemiologist or delve more into academic and clinical research (many applied epidemiologists also write papers for publication, it’s just more of a question of the type of papers you would like to be writing).
What do you wish you had known as a student?
I used to think grade “deflation” was the worst thing in the world, until I was suddenly surrounded by flagrant grade inflation. Trust me, the latter is much worse! In the end, however, a grade is just a grade, and doesn’t define you or your passion.
If you could come back and take one class at Wellesley what would it be?
Susan Reverby’s class on the history of American healthcare. Her research on the Tuskegee study and Guatemala was a focal point of much discussion in my classes at Emory.