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Hey folks, welcome back to the [00:01:00] podcast. I am excited to be here with you and so glad to be able to share my guest today, Dr. Janice Lepore. She is a Maryland licensed psychologist who has provided assessment, therapy, and consultation services in schools, hospitals, clinics, and her own private practice for the past 20 years.
Over the past 10 years, she has also been engaged in local and state-level policy and advocacy addressing issues related to mental and behavioral health, education, disability access and inclusion, and health equity and access. In 2023, Janice was selected as an APA/AAAS Congressional Fellow and placed her practice on sabbatical to spend a year embedded with the Health Policy team at the US Senate Committee on Finance.
If that sounds super interesting, then you’re in the right place. That is what we were talking about here today during the podcast. Janice has made the leap from being a psychologist to a legislator and advocate. And that’s our conversation today.
So we talk about [00:02:00] Janice’s journey, how her personal experience got her into this area and the work that she did with legislation and activism prior to the fellowship, we talk about the fellowship itself, how you apply, the interview process, we talk about the daily life of a Congressional fellow, we talk about surprises from her time in Congress, and we also discuss ways for all of us to get involved if we can’t work in Washington, DC for a year as some can. So we talk about local and even some national ways to get involved even if it falls a little short of moving to DC.
This is a fascinating conversation. I’ve known Janice for years and have always respected her voice and the way that she shows up primarily in The Testing Psychologist community on Facebook. She is always a very reasonable, rational voice in the group and research-driven, which I think we [00:03:00] can all respect. So I hope you enjoy my conversation here with Dr. Janice Lepore.
Hey Janice, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Janice: Hey, thanks for having me.
Dr. Sharp: I am glad to have you. We are talking about something today that is completely brand new to the podcast. We’re talking about, I don’t know what I would call it, activism or advocacy or maybe just careers outside of psychology but I’ll leave that to you to put the right term on it, but in either way, I’m thrilled to have you here and very curious to hear about your experience outside the traditional psychologist path. So thanks for being here.
Dr. Janice: Absolutely. I’m happy to be here. I think you could use any one of those [00:04:00] terms and probably two more. Everyone’s path is a little different than they define it themselves, but I’m happy to talk about my path and what I’ve been doing the last year or so.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That sounds great. We’re going to get into so many details around this and what the experience was like, but I’ll ask you that question that I ask everyone right off the bat, which is, why do this? Basically, why is this important or meaningful to you?
Dr. Janice: Sure. I brought to my career some personal experience, an advocacy mindset or an advocacy approach just tending to think about how the systems are working or not working, and who is being impacted, who is in the driving seat, those kinds of questions have always been a little bit of who I am as a professional.
And so I think for me, especially in the work that I did clinically working with children and [00:05:00] families, that led me to pay attention to some of the systems issues that can come up when we’re trying to coordinate different kinds of care and different kinds of services, interventions, and support.
For me, that also led to asking questions about the policies that created some of those situations and asking whether we could do something to change those policies, to make things better, to ease the way, and eventually that led to two of, I jokingly say, side gigs, some volunteer positions doing some advocacy, doing some policy work and then eventually being invited to write legislation for my state to try and address some questions and some issues around early childhood screening, identification and intervention.
Over time as I was doing my clinical work, I was also taking on these policy and advocacy roles, I became, and we’ll talk a little more about it, but more and more interested in doing more policy work [00:06:00] and making a potential career shift. And so as I was exploring how that might look, I decided to apply to the Congressional Fellowship that is offered by APA, the American Psychological Association, in partnership with AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
I had known about the fellowship for a long time but had kept putting it off and not applied. Finally, I decided this was the year to apply and I was fortunate to be offered a position and then to go off to DC and do a yearlong placement with the United States Senate.
For me, it was an exploration of policy as a profession. It was something that I liked to do all the time. It is a full-time opportunity that’d be interesting to me. And so my why is a little bit of a combination of wanting to do good work, continuing to want to serve the mission like I have as a psychologist, and exploring a new career path.
[00:07:00] Dr. Sharp: Sure. I know that a lot of factors came together to make this possible for you. We’ll talk about some of those things but right out of the gate, this is super interesting and compelling. I know it’s a path that not many of us get to take and you’ve had a really cool opportunity here.Maybe we go back and start in some of the background. You said, I took on two side gigs and did a little advocacy, and then all of a sudden we were writing a bill. I think people might be interested in those beginning steps and what that means when you say side gigs and advocacy. How did that even turn into writing legislation before you even took this fellowship?
Dr. Janice: It happened the way it sounds. I think that’s an important story to tell because that’s one thing that, to me, is really important [00:08:00] when I talk about my path into policy and through policy is that it often feels to people like it’s got to be this big commitment. You got to move to DC or you got to go talk to your senator, and they’re hard to get ahold of.
My path into real policy work started because I was a parent of a child who was identified with dyslexia. She was identified later than we would all agree is ideal, at the end of 3rd grade, even though she lived in my house. And that’s what I do for a living is identify kids who have learning differences and support them.
And so I was just in a parent group with other parents of kids with dyslexia, and talking about how many kids got late-identified and how many kids get identified much later than 3rd grade and what we know about intervention.
They were asking me; don’t we know that early intervention is the best? Yes, we do, we know early intervention [00:09:00] changes lives and changes brains. They said, we should be able to identify kids earlier than that. I said, we should. They said, we think we should do early screening and I said we should. They said, we’re going to write a bill, you want to help?
It was that simple. Was I in those spaces because I had an advocacy mindset and was I willing to talk about those things because as a psychologist, we talk about those things all the time? Yes, but the fact that it came together in that moment was happenstance and a little bit of luck.
Honestly, that’s how I think a lot of policy work. So I said yes, and then started working with a grassroots organization. It’s Decoding Dyslexia. Different parents and different professionals may have had some contact with it.
This has been my experience throughout as I’ve had more experience with policy. Policy starts with a good idea and committed people. And then you start talking about what should be in the [00:10:00] bill, what do we need to be thinking about.
My contribution to that piece in this particular place was saying, we need to have solid science in the bill. We need to be talking about what has to happen with the assessment, that it should be reliable and valid assessment. We need to start talking about the components and the skills that we should be assessing. And you go back and forth.
We didn’t write a whole bill reflecting the totality of the psychological knowledge about assessment because that would be pages and overly burdensome so then you bring it back and we say, okay, what else do we need? We need to make sure there’s intervention as well.
Okay, we need to be partnering with our school psychologist colleagues. They’re going to know how this looks in the school. We brought that person in from our state school psychological association. So that collaborative effort and that back and forth is how bill development goes. And that was my experience with my first bill.
And then we did the next part, which is, okay, you need a sponsor. How do you get it into the legislature? [00:11:00] How does the bill even get introduced? The Schoolhouse Rock version is not wrong; it’s just lacking in some detail.
Dr. Sharp: Oh yeah. Let’s run through that real quick just for folks. I’m very curious about that too. How do you go from a bunch of parents sitting together in a room and writing something cool or not, and then getting people to pay attention to it?
Dr. Janice: Then you start meeting with your representatives or you have relationships. And so Decoding Dyslexia was an active group already in Maryland. They had some relationships with legislators.
You go and you tell people, this is what we think should be happening. Here’s our rough draft of what we think we should have in a screening bill. Are you interested in supporting it? Would you be willing to sponsor it? Are you interested in asking other people whether they’d want to sponsor it?
Ideally, in our case, eventually, you get a yes, and then you have sponsorship in the legislature and they know how to introduce it and start working with the staff. Who else [00:12:00] do we need to sponsor the bill?
If you’ve got somebody on the Senate side of your general legislature, then you also need somebody on the House side. It has to go through both houses in order to pass and become a law, so it has to be introduced usually on both sides.
So if you’ve a sponsor on one side, you got to get a sponsor on the other side but usually, the legislator that you’re working with will have somebody that they also work with frequently or feel would be interested in this bill and the staff and the representative help you figure out like who the logistics are.
It’s a whole process from there, once it’s introduced, it gets assigned to a committee, the committee looks at it, there’s hearings, there’s testimony, there’s witnesses for, there’s witnesses against. It has to get passed out of committee, then it has to get passed off the floor of the particular chamber, the House for the Senate, then it has to get up in the state level to the governor, the governor has to decide to sign it or veto it. So there’s a lot of steps in the process and it often takes quite some time.
Dr. Sharp: How long did it take [00:13:00] from start to finish with this particular bill?
Dr. Janice: From start to finish, I’m not sure I could even time it because I did not, unfortunately, write down the date that I was invited to start working on it. We needed to put together an advocacy campaign for two consecutive sessions of the general assembly.
In Maryland, we have a general assembly that meets for about 3 months between January and April. The way that the Maryland General Assembly works, everything that gets passed in the state gets passed in that window. You have to introduce it, after the general assembly opens, it has to get passed by the final day of general assembly session or it dies and you have to rebring it up the next year.
That’s not how every state legislature works and that kind of timing isn’t what every state legislature follows. Some legislatures meet once every 2 years. Some meet for a longer period of time. Some have what are called carry-over [00:14:00] bill. So if it doesn’t pass the session, you can try it again next session.
For us, we were not successful. We got very close to passage in the first year. We successfully got it passed out of the House side, but we’re not able to get it successfully passed out of the Senate side finally. So we didn’t get it passed in the first year and we had to come back, regain plan and carry it through the second year.
We were able to get it passed in two sessions, which is lightning fast. Usually, it does take three or more to get something through the General Assembly.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. Where did you go from there? I’m just thinking about the timeline and your experience here. So you had the experience with the state legislature and then what was the gap before the fellowship became a possibility?
Dr. Janice: I was running a private practice at the [00:15:00] time, raising three kids and continuing to do those things and to be a clinician, to work with local schools and organizations, to work with my kids’ schools and talk about different things that we saw systemically that we could maybe change.
We also were continuing to do some work. One of the important things to know about passing policy is that once it’s signed into law, you start the real work because once it’s signed into law, then it has to get implemented by whatever agency is in charge of it, in our case, the State Department of Education, they have to write regulations.
So the letter of the law is one thing, but then the regulations around how it gets implemented is often written by the agency on the back end and those regulations can change how the law actually works in the world, [00:16:00] either for the better or for the worse.
So as an example Ready to Read, when we wrote it, we initially wanted to have screening for everyone in kindergarten through 3rd grade, and through negotiations on the bill, it wound up being kindergarten and 1st, we 2nd and 3rd grade. There were other negotiations, but that was one of them.
On the back end when it finally got out to MSDE and they started writing the regulations and they did the implementation, we had a change by that point in our state superintendent and he looked at the Ready to Read requirements, I haven’t said this before but Ready to Read was the name of the bill, the Ready to Read in Maryland.
So our state superintendent looked at it and said, why aren’t we screening kids in 2nd grade and 3rd grade, too? We members of Decoding Dyslexia and other advocates in the reading community were continuing to watch the implementation and make sure that it had carried out correctly and said, yes, we [00:17:00] do. We think that’s a good idea. So he wrote that into regulation.
And so now the impact of Ready to Read is expanded because the regulatory change was put in place and they didn’t go back and rewrite the law, which they don’t have to, especially if they’re expanding it. They can do some things in regulation.
So that was part of what I was doing and then I got approached for different opportunities. The National Center on Learning Disabilities asked if I would be willing to work for their policy advisory committee. I had approached my professional organization, the Maryland State Psychological Association, to be supporter of the Ready to Read Act and they in turn invited me to come work with them on some of their legislative priorities and some things that they were trying to do.
So I was doing some of that work. There in Maryland, we were trying to do, we still are in the process of statewide education reform. There were some nonprofit organizations that I was working with as an advocate and doing a lot of that work, [00:18:00] like I said, on the side while I was running the practice and raising my kids and navigating COVID as we all did.
So that’s what took up the time between 2019 when Ready to Read passed and then 2023, which is when I decided to apply for the fellowship.
Dr. Sharp: I see. It sounds like just getting into that world opened up a lot of doors. I would imagine that once you go down that path and start to interact with and make relationships with certain groups or individuals, it’s a lot easier to continue down that path and people start to know your name. It sounds like you got a bit of a reputation as advocate or person who can do this work.
Dr. Janice: Yeah. I think the other thing that’s important to know is that policy like psychology is very much about relationships. We hear that [00:19:00] played out sometimes as it’s got to be who you know. I think that’s true in a lot of spaces.
What I mean when I say policies about relationships is getting to know the people who are working on the same problems that I consider to be important, getting to hear their perspectives, why they’re working on those problems, and what they think some of the solutions are, building those relationships is what is engaging and interesting to me about policy, what certainly has drawn me further into it especially when I found people with whom I disagree.
What I have found and what’s been most meaningful to me about policy is working with policy people working on policy is the thing that probably has made me feel most optimistic and positive about politics in our country and our government and how it works because I’ve gotten to know [00:20:00] not the caricatures of people but the actual humans and why they’re doing this and what they’re working on.
My experience has been that people are really committed to the mission and want to do good work and produce good results. There’s a lot of people with different opinions who are still willing to work on those same goals.
Dr. Sharp: That’s really interesting to hear. That’s very encouraging because I think we do get, without getting in the weeds with political stuff because that’s a potential nightmare, but we do see certain characters, like you said, in the news more frequently than others.
I’m so excited to dig into the details of this Congressional fellowship and what that was like as you were interacting with the “normal” everyday folks, the other folks who are not making headlines every single day and what that experience was like, but it sounds like it was positive and that’s honestly a little [00:21:00] surprising to hear you say that that made you feel a little more optimistic about things. That’ll be cool to talk about.
Let’s dig into the fellowship experience, walk me through the bit, where did you hear about it? Did you get invited to apply for it? Did you do it on your own? How did this come about?
Dr. Janice: I first became aware of the fellowship very early on, I was a new graduate, so it was about 20 years ago, which hurts my heart to say but that’s true. I was on an APA conference. It was here in DC. There was a table and they said we have these positions where you come full-time and you spend a year working on policy.
And as I said, my personality and character, I came in with an advocacy mindset. There was a part of me that was like, that sounds really cool. I had just gotten this degree. I planned on a clinical career like a lot of us do. I had started a clinical career and I also [00:22:00] had young family.
Disappearing to DC for a year was not in the cards, but it hung around in the back of my head, and I talked about it every now and then. If any of my friends are listening, they’re probably laughing because it was probably more frequently, every now and then.
And then as I started to move from an advocacy perspective to working on policy, and then I got the bill, we worked, got the bill passed, and I was working in other volunteer policy positions more and more, I thought this is what I think I want to do. I want to spend more time doing that.
And as we all know, I’m running a practice. I had employees for a while. It was a group practice. It was very busy. It was hard to find time to do the policy work. I couldn’t conceive of how do you disappear to DC. I’ve got teenagers now, it’s still not ideal but I also had this strong [00:23:00] sense that that was the next thing.
I loved the clinical work I was doing. I loved serving our patients, but there was this really strong sense that this was the next thing that I was supposed to do. It took me probably a year or two of going back and forth and figure out, I don’t know if I could do that and here’s all the reasons why I can’t do that.
I do have to give all credit to my partner and my husband, he finally said, we’ll figure it out. My employees went off and one started her own practice, another went back to work in the schools. They are very successful. I’m super proud of them, but all of a sudden I was back in solo practice and so I didn’t have to think about, I can’t abandon my employees anymore.
The kids got a little bit older and they’re a little bit more self-sufficient and I still was, I can’t be in DC 5 days a week. My husband said, yeah, you can, we’ll [00:24:00] figure it out. This is important. What he finally said was, you’ve been talking about this for 20 years, would you please do it?
The application is on APA’s website. I went and I wrote up the application and didn’t know how it was going to go. It’s a very competitive process. Lots of really good people apply each year. I did the interview and then was offered the position.
Just to clarify, APA right now sponsors 3 Congressional fellowship positions and 1 in the executive branch, which is like the Agencies and Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Education.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s wild. So you applied and it happened.
Dr. Janice: I applied, I interviewed, I was offered it in March 2023, somewhere around there. And then the actual fellowship starts in September. And so between March [00:25:00] 2023 and September 2023, I figured out how to put my practice on sabbatical and get my kids arranged and arrange my life.
And then September 1, 2023, I took a train down to DC to start orientation and see where things went from there. I didn’t know how it was going to play out.
Dr. Sharp: Of course not. It seems like a huge leap. One of the things that jumps out at me right away is major imposter syndrome. So thinking of myself, going into an environment like that, which feels pretty scary and new and like a fish out of water situation, I’m interested to hear how you worked through that.
I assume you felt some of that, if not, I’d love to hear why you didn’t and what kind of superhuman you must be. Let’s talk through that if you’re willing.
Dr. Janice: No, I live with the imposter syndrome and I think most of us [00:26:00] do. I have made my peace with it a little bit.
I will never forget about 10 years ago, a good friend and colleague of mine who is globally known and has written bestselling books mentioned that he felt like an imposter when she was invited to speak on the topic of her expertise. That was a moment for me where I thought, okay, then imposter syndrome never goes away and I’m just going to have to live with it.
Definitely, I’ve felt that and I took that with me to DC. Especially when I was stepping into the orientation and I didn’t know how the placement process worked, I didn’t have the opportunity to be quite as intimidated because at first it was just doing a two-week orientation on policy with scientists who are interested in policy.
So the AAAS Fellowship, who APA partners with, is doctoral level [00:27:00] scientists of all disciplines who are interested in policy. It was just a group of people who love science and policy. It’s a major geek fest. It was great.
So we were learning about different things and then I was meeting different people who had a PhD in entomology and somebody who had done a dissertation on mushrooms. It was a really cool time just getting to know these people and why they were in policy and which ones they were interested.
They’re working on climate policy; they’re working on all sorts of different stuff. That was a great 2 weeks. The imposter syndrome hit when we had to go around and do interviews.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. Tell me about that process.
Dr. Janice: Yeah. That process is a lot like the Internship Match. There were several moments in the process where I thought, I can’t believe I did this to myself again.
You get a listing, as fellows, we get list things of the offices who are interested in having [00:28:00] a fellow and it’s a full-time fellow that’s funded. So that’s a great resource. A lot of the offices are deeply interested in having somebody who has expertise in science and who can speak to science and communicate how science translates to policy. So there’s a lot of interest in the fellows.
We get the book; it describes the different offices that are interested. I thought through who I might want to work with. I had a little bit of sense who’s on what committee, who does what, I was coming in with that sort of information.
So you figure out who you might want to interview with. You see who’s offering a position and then it’s just emails back and forth, I’d like to interview for a position or they invite you.
I was invited, where I wound up was the Senate Finance Committee. When I was invited for an interview to Senate Finance, I was confused because I didn’t know anything about the Senate Finance Committee. I didn’t know why [00:29:00] they would need a health fellow, which was the area I was focusing in.
So I had to flip back to the job description and realize that Senate Finance is where all law is made around Medicare and Medicaid. Also, ATA plans and exchange plans all reside in the Senate Finance Committee. So that was my first learning. And then I accepted the opportunity to interview.
I don’t have a background in Medicare and Medicaid policy. I didn’t know very much about it. Most of my work previously have been in education but I was looking at the fellowship, as I said, as opportunity to learn about policy work. My approach to that was I’m going to take the hardest thing I get offered, and Senate Finance and Medicare and Medicaid policy definitely sounded like the hardest thing I could do.
So I interviewed. The whole interview process definitely was an exercise in imposter syndrome. I interviewed in 19 different offices over a course of 3 days. [00:30:00] It was exhausting. I got asked questions I did not know the answer to. It’s been a very long time as a person who’s been in micro for 20 years that I did not have answers to questions.
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
Dr. Janice: So you had to get comfortable with that.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I want to focus on that for a second. I was talking with a colleague of mine who’s doing the Psychopharmacology program; the Master’s in Psychopharmacology. It was a similar thing; it takes a lot.
I think it’s a vulnerable process to go from this point in your career where you’re presumably quite successful, knowledgeable and secure to put yourself back into a novel situation again where you don’t know the answers to questions and have to be a learner again.
Dr. Janice: Yeah, it was very challenging. It was an amazingly good experience though. It was really great to be able to do that. I had to get comfortable with being off balance [00:31:00] and not knowing exactly how things would pan out.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Easier said than done. Yes.
Dr. Janice: Once you do the interviews, there’s a specific day where they can offer you a position. And like the Internship Match, sometimes that works out well and sometimes it doesn’t. I did not get offered a position the first day that offers were made. The position I wound up in eventually was initially offered to another fellow.
That was a challenging experience too. Several other fellows were in that position. One of the things we worked through is this is a very competitive process where we would all do good work in any one of these positions, they can only have one fellow. Sometimes that happens.
But the second day, the next day, I was offered my top three positions. Senate Finance was declined and then I was able to look at that one and I had two other really [00:32:00] good positions. So I had a different day, the second day, trying to figure out which kind of experience I wanted to have.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. What a turn of events. Oh my gosh.
Dr. Janice: It really was. When I say kind of experience, just to explain a little bit, you can work in a personal office or in a committee office, then the two types of work are very different. A personal office is in the office of a representative or a senator and in that role, you’re very much representing the interests of their constituents, state of Nevada; the specific representative, Maryland 3, whoever those constituents are, that’s what you’re there to do. You’re working on the issues that are important to that member and to their constituents.
In a committee office, you’re working on topics under the jurisdiction of that committee. So the laws that will come through that committee. So finance, as I said, is [00:33:00] where Medicare and Medicaid law comes through.
We work with the entire committee staff, which means us, but also the personal staff of each member of the finance committee, and look at developing the policy that will come out of the Senate Finance Committee as a whole. So the work is different in scope.
Dr. Sharp: I got you. I wanted to go back to some basic details of this. I assume this is unpaid, but maybe it is paid. I’m sure people are wondering about this.
Dr. Janice: I wasn’t quite that brave. No, it is funded. APA posts the stipends for it each year. And so we had a base stipend of $90,000.
Dr. Sharp: That’s not terrible.
Dr. Janice: No, it’s not terrible. They provide some, right now, additional [00:34:00] funding for things like professional development. So if you want to attend a conference or things like that and also reimbursement for health insurance is a part of it. So it’s not free. You’re not going to become rich working in government, but that puts you right there with everybody else.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s honestly a lot better. I was thinking in my mind; this was either unpaid or like a postdoc situation where we’re in the $50,000 to $60,000 range. So that’s a lot better than I was expecting. I’m sure not the same as a private practice, but better than nothing.
I am curious about the maybe personal logistics. Did you move to DC for a year or were you commuting every day? I know you live in Maryland, so maybe that was a little easier than it would be for some folks, but how did that work out?
Dr. Janice: We stayed in Maryland. As [00:35:00] I said, we have three kids, they’re all in school and that’s, as you know, not something you try to disrupt. I live about 5 miles away from the train station. So I commuted into DC.
My office has a policy where they’re in office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then teleworking on Monday, Friday but each office is different. So each senator, each committee, representative runs their office the way they want. Some are there 5 days a week, some have a flexible telework schedule, and then there’s differences between what’s called in-session and recess.
In-session is what you see under the TV when they’re debating bills, or they’re potentially passing work solution, when they’re working together. During periods of recess, then there’s not going to be what’s called floor activity. There won’t be bills or debates or things going on, and most often the members go back to their areas that they’re representing to hold town halls and do other kinds of things.
For [00:36:00] me, it was commuting about 3 days a week, less in recess and good flexibility but that was definitely a part of my process of finding a placement. When I was doing those interviews, some of the questions I was asking were, what are your flexibility?
Even with that, they were long days. I got on the train usually around eight o’clock, I got home usually around seven o’clock. There’s after hours staff and hearings and sometimes things went late. So this definitely wouldn’t have been possible for me without the support of my family who really wanted to see this happen.
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Okay, that sounds good. It sounds like you were able to do the commute and that worked for your family. It sounds like it was busy certainly, but you’re able to make it work. What about the other fellows or folks who are maybe thinking about doing this, what did it look like for folks who didn’t live so close?
Dr. Janice: As I said, we had 4 fellows total who are APA fellows. One moved from Maryland to DC and then another fellow moved from Florida to DC on a temporary [00:39:00] basis. Those two that I spoke about, we were also in Congress, so all three of us were in Congress together.
The 4th fellow, who was an executive branch fellow, who worked with SAMHSA, a lot of her work could be done by telework so she wasn’t sure at the beginning of the fellowship if she was going to move to DC permanently. She lived in California. She wound up over the course of the year not having to do that, being able to come in when she needed to come in but spending a lot of her work doing her work remotely.
I know that that’s true for the other broader AAAS cohort. There’s about 200 AAAS Fellows every year. Many of them do move to DC because it works for them and their families but there is some opportunity to do remote work or balance out a hybrid schedule.
Dr. Sharp: I see. This is a dumb question, but I feel like I’m asking more of those this episode than others
[00:40:00] so I just go with it. I feel like we see in the media, TV, movies, and all that kind of stuff, the hustle and bustle of DC, legislation, government, and all those things. Part of that, I feel like is always doing things after hours, parties, relationship building, and all that kind of stuff. Is that legitimate and did that touch this fellowship or not?Dr. Janice: Yeah, there is always work going on. There is always more work that you could do. There is always another thing that you could attend, another briefing that you could hear. People come into DC and talk about their experiences.
Of course, we’re also covering the country. Our committee chair, Senate Finance Committee, is chaired by Senator Wyden. Senator Wyden’s from Oregon. [00:41:00] Oregon’s on a different time schedule than DC, and we want to know what’s going on in Oregon.
The pace of work that we see from the outside is not unrealistic. That is how it works, but part of the learning this year too, was learning how to pace myself and decide when I need to set this down and move on or go home or when I needed to say, I’m going to stay late so I can go through this extra thing. That is definitely a part of the process.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. What about the rest of the day-to-day? I’m fascinated by what this, when you show up to work in the morning, what do you do? What is a typical day in a position like this?
Dr. Janice: I’m off fellowship now just to be clear. I finished August 31st [00:42:00] but the day-to-day, I don’t think it differs so much from psychology except that in policy, my schedule was even less critical.
Dr. Sharp: It sounds like a nightmare.
Dr. Janice: You walk in and you have your meetings and you have your plan for the day and whatever it is you’re working on. It could be a topic, it could be a piece of legislation, it could be hearing. Many of the committees hold hearings on different topics that they’re planning to build legislation on. That’s a whole research and involves process that goes on for months before you actually see those hearings emerge on TV.
So you’re doing all of that and then something happens in the news or something changes in policy landscape or somebody makes some decision and something gets attacked, and now that’s what you’re working on. You have to set everything else aside and plans that come back.
What do I do first thing? I check my [00:43:00] email. I check my schedule. I check the messages to see what might have changed and then make the plan from there. Okay, here are the pockets I have in here and these are the things I need to do.
The committee staff is made up of our health chief who leads the team and then the default four parts of Medicare have a different senior advisor who’s in charge of that area. So they have Medicare Part A which is hospitals, Part B which is outpatient physician care, Part C which is the Medicare Advantage program in Part C and then that person also does affordable care as an exchange in coverage, and then there’s Part D which is the prescription and drug benefit.
So there’s 4 senior advisors there and then Medicaid [00:44:00] has its own senior advisor. So there were 5 of them, our legislative analyst who keeps everything going and organized, and then about 4 interns or policy fellows, depending on where we were in the year in the cycle. So it was 8 to 9 people altogether.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. How much of your day was spent on one-on-one independent work versus group meetings or activities? How did that balance out?
Dr. Janice: I would say that the workflow throughout the experience was collaborative. You never have one person writing something or leading something or out there solo. They’re working with other members of our team. They’re working with other members of the Congressional staff, representative senators who are on the Finance Committee and working across parties, which I think is an important part.
Everything that came out of the [00:45:00] Senate Finance Committee while I was working there and to my understanding, the history of the Senate Finance Committee is that it works on a very bipartisan basis. Everything that’s out there as a proposal or that gets put out as a bill for a vote has agreement from Republican offices and Democratic offices.
Not all of them but at least agreement from some subsection. That’s a really high priority of the leadership of the committee and so it’s a commitment of the staff. So anything that you see in public is always a collaborative effort and something that we’ve worked on internally with the staff, but also externally with agencies and stakeholders and researchers and input from different outside people.
I think that’s one of the important things for people to know too, that’s an opportunity to have input. You don’t have to go and move to DC, you can be available as a subject matter expert or somebody who’s willing to talk to the legislators about your experience and perspective and that can [00:46:00] inform the development of policy.
Dr. Sharp: I definitely want to talk about how some of us might be able to get involved in this kind of work, maybe without moving to DC, I don’t know how doable that is but before we maybe totally jump to that topic, I’d love to just do a big picture retrospective; what do you feel like you took away from this experience? What was most surprising? What did you learn? What are you carrying with you? That kind of thing.
Dr. Janice: I did not know before I did this how many opportunities there are to contribute, as somebody who is interested in science and interested in serving people, how many opportunities there are to do that in policy and in our government. There [00:47:00] are fellows and former fellows and other scientists in every single federal agency providing insight, advice, guidance and working very hard.
I was in Congress, but there are people in Department of Education who are certainly helping human services, tons of them, Department of Defense, Department of State and there are former psychology fellows in all of those agencies that I just mentioned contributing to the work and trying to do good policy. That’s one thing.
The other thing I learned that I didn’t know before was how incredibly bipartisan the work that is going on in DC is. I think that’s really important to know. It’s odd now to see the headlines or to see things talked about in the media as being always divisive, nobody can talk to each other and nobody can get together because I just spent a year in the most partisan place in the [00:48:00] country and if that were true, you’d expect nobody to talk to each other, but every people do.
We work together ideally and everywhere all the time and is it a happy joy little place, no, it’s people working together on difficult things. And not everybody’s going to agree but very often and all of my year, I continually saw how different people with different perspectives on how to solve problems are coming together and working on how to make the best policy they can, and that’s the commitment is how do we make the best policy we can to solve some of the problems that we see.
So the bipartisanship of DC was a learning and the opportunities for people interested in science and interested in serving others, it was a learning.
Dr. Sharp: That’s inspiring. It’s really good to hear that. It’s easy to get caught up in the headlines and that doesn’t always make it sound like there’s a lot of collaboration [00:49:00] and working together happening.
Janice: Yeah.
Dr. Sharp: Thanks for sharing that. Did you get a front-row seat to APA’s work? I know a lot of people talk about how much APA is or is not advocating for us, particularly with rates with Medicare and CMS and that kind of thing. Is there anything you can say about that? If not, that’s okay.
Dr. Janice: Yeah. The Senate and the House also have very strong ethics committees and roles. And so because I was funded by APA, I was not able to participate in anything that APA was lobbying on because that would be a conflict of interest and inappropriate.
That said, I know the APA advocacy people, I knew them a little bit from some of my other work before I took on the fellowship and then I always knew when they were on the Hill, when they were doing a briefing. [00:50:00] Really committed team, want to do good work and solve problems.
One thing that’s important for people to know in here and this is in general about policy is that the people who are working on the policy are very good at policy, but they haven’t had the experience you’ve had as a provider. Most of them are not like me, who decides, let me set aside this career and go do a second career.
They haven’t been healthcare providers, and so they don’t necessarily know exactly what it looks like on the ground or what the challenges or experiences are that we’re having.
If we want good policy to be written for our providers, we have to be in the game and be talking to the people who are working on the policy. There has to be communication. It’s not realistic to expect them to know what we need without [00:51:00] communicating.
I know some people will say, I wrote an email. Yes, it needs to be persistent and it needs to be group communication and it probably needs to be multiple communications over time. Just like our work with our patients, it takes time to affect change so too in policy.
Dr. Sharp: Of course. That’s maybe a nice segue to how many of us can get involved with this kind of activity from wherever we’re at. Do you have thoughts on?
Dr. Janice: I definitely did this. This is a passion of mine because I do feel like the more diversity of participation we have, the better policy we get. And like I said before, I think the perception and I understand why it’s this way is that you got to go to DC to make any difference, but I made a difference just by being in a group with other parents [00:52:00], and saying, hey, I know something about this and I’d be willing to contribute my time.
All participation at all levels is really valuable and it’s accessible and it can build on its own. So it could be something as, I don’t want to say simple or small because it’s not simple or small, but something as local as knowing who represents you in the various offices.
For some of us, our board members are elected, then you have a representative. Certainly, in Maryland, we have representatives by district and then we have State Senate Representatives, just getting to know who are your representatives in your state legislature and what are they working on.
You don’t even have to talk to them if you’re tired and you don’t want to, you can go to their website, they usually have a newsletter and sign up there where they have a town hall and you can [00:53:00] go. You can draft an email about something that’s important to you and send it along.
All of those little initiatives that may feel like not very much are actually contributing. People do read all of those. I know, part of my job as a fellow was to read the comment letters and to put it all together. So all of those pieces of input even at the local level, at the state level are valuable.
Dr. Sharp: That’s really good to hear. I think people get, myself included, I’m not just going to speak in generalities, I get overwhelmed with the options and it’s like a double-edged sword. I don’t know what all the options are, but the ones I do know of also seem murky and overwhelming. It’s hard to know what’s a good first step if we want to engage in some kind of activism or make a difference, so to speak, or anything in that realm.
[00:54:00] Dr. Janice: I think the best first step, honestly, is find out who represents you and see what they wrote about in their last newsletter.Dr. Sharp: Yeah, that’s a great concrete first step. I love that.
Dr. Janice: The other piece that I think particularly for our colleagues is get in touch with your state professional association. They probably have a legislative or advocacy arm that’s working with your legislature. So at very least they know what’s going on. They also have communication up to APA.
If you’re not wanting to work at the national level, or I know some people are frustrated with APA but what about your state professional association? Are you communicating with them? Are you finding them to work? If that’s not working for you, there’s lots of other organizations that have government relations and policy arms, and you can just watch what they’re doing and be informed. That’s a great first step.
[00:55:00] So NAMI and Mental Health America we all know these different nonprofit organizations that work on topics of interest to us. What are they doing in the policy space? Just so you know is a great way to start.Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. This has been a great conversation. I know that we could as always go into the weeds and so many different things, and I have a lot of simple questions about the whole experience that I’m not going to bore our audience with.
This is fascinating. I love that you have made this pivot in your career. I’m curious where it goes from here. I know you’re considering a more permanent career change, has it been meaningful enough to pull you down this path a little more formally?
Dr. Janice: Yeah, it has definitely been meaningful. [00:56:00] One of the learnings that I found out as I was applying to the fellowship, you asked for letters of reference, and so I asked my colleagues at the NCLB for a letter of reference. And as part of that process, they went in and they did the research, bless them, and came back and found out that Ready to Read, which I talked about, in its first year of implementation identified 70, 000 students statewide.
So that’s 70,000 kids and we all know, there’s some not false positives in there, maybe not all those kids got intervention, but that kind of breadth of impact is, for me, like the red pill moment of policy. I am not going to be able to do that as a practitioner running the practice and the opportunity to have that kind of impact, it’s just something I can’t pass up.
So I am figuring out what that looks like. I don’t [00:57:00] know what the next step is, but I’m definitely exploring and interested in other policy opportunities to use my expertise as a healthcare provider and education advocate, a parent, and human to try and have a positive, bigger impact.
Dr. Sharp: Kudos to you for cracking the code a little bit. I feel like a lot of us got into this field to “help” people and always are looking for ways to do that on a bigger scale. You have found a way to do that and that’s pretty admirable. So I’m very grateful that you’re willing to come on and share your experience with this whole journey.
Dr. Janice: Absolutely. Thanks so much. It’s been great talking to you.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode, always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes [00:58:00] so make sure to check those out.
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