Gergen Summer Fellowship Reflection: Camy Pearson

As a dual MBA/MPA candidate at Stanford's GSB and Harvard Kennedy School, I’ve just graduated from the GSB and am now entering my last year at HKS. I’m so grateful that the Gergen Fellowship afforded me the unique opportunity to live and work in DC this past summer as I got my first exposure to public service. 

I grew up in Santa Rosa, California, which is over 2,000 miles away from Washington DC. People in my hometown tend to focus on local politics, and thus few ever spoke of living on the East Coast, let alone working in the federal government. For my undergraduate education, I chose to adventure outside of my beloved West Coast to experience a different part of the country: the Midwest. At the University of Chicago, I pursued both my love of learning by double-majoring in Economics and Biological Sciences and my passion for soccer by playing on the varsity team. 

Since college, I’ve invested the last decade of my career into improving healthcare efficacy and access, working throughout the industry in digital health, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. I’ve mostly focused on startups, with my longest stint at digital health unicorn Virta Health, which we grew from seed to Series E over 6 years. 

I knew that there was a key stone left unturned in my quest to learn, through operating experience, how to improve our healthcare system: the government. As the daughter of a military veteran father and first-generation immigrant mother, I have always desired to serve my country. Thus, for my final grad school summer internship, I applied for the Gergen Fellowship. I was excited about the idea of finally exploring the public sector, which I’d been pondering pivoting into since beginning graduate school. 

This summer, with the generous support of the Gergen Fellowship, I was fortunate enough to work in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). I worked for 10 weeks in Washington DC at HHS headquarters in the Humphrey building, supporting the Deputy Secretary and her team on projects related to technology and operations. For my first assignment, I collaborated across HHS’s many Operating Divisions (e.g. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, etc.) and Staff Divisions (e.g. Office of General Counsel, Office of Intergovernmental & External Affairs, etc.) to draft a policy for sharing HHS data with Tribal nations and Tribal Epidemiology Centers. This required leading a very diverse working group of stakeholders through ideation, many rounds of implementation workshopping and legal review, internal clearance, and formal notification to Tribal leadership of consultation. My second assignment was operationally-driven, and partnered me with the Office of National Security to help them translate risk management principles into an internal policy, implementation plan, and systematic process. 

My internship was the ideal entry into public service. I was lucky to be mentored by several dedicated public leaders who helped me acclimate to the opposite of a startup environment. Prior to HHS, I had never worked in an organization of more than 500 people, and yet HHS was 400 times larger than that at 80,000 employees. Furthermore, by working on both policy and operational projects, I was exposed to exactly what I wanted to learn: how is the proverbial sausage made, both externally in government programs and internally in everyday government operations? What makes each difficult to operate at scale, and what kinds of policies and process changes could be used to make our government more effective? And when differing but important stakeholder needs come into conflict, how do leaders make the difficult call of what to prioritize? 

As I enter my final year at HKS, I recognize that this summer has only made me more interested in examining these tough questions. While I don’t pretend to know the answers, what I have learned is that my enthusiasm for exploring potential solutions only continues to increase.