Notes from the Field: Emily Schneider ’19

Emily Schneider ’19 grew up in Lyons, Colorado and graduated from Lyons High School as valedictorian. At Dartmouth, Emily is majoring in computational biology and minoring in Public Policy. She is a chair of Students Fighting Hunger, a volunteer organization that provides meals for low-income families in the Upper Valley, and is an active member of the Dartmouth Outing Club. Emily has conducted research at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy, where she co-authored a recently published paper. She has also worked for the Rockefeller Policy Research Shop for several terms, producing reports for the Vermont and New Hampshire state legislatures. After graduation, Emily hopes to get a master’s degree in health policy or public health, and later work in health policy research.

Emily was funded by the Rockefeller Center for a Fall 2017 internship, with generous support from the Peter McSpadden ’52 Memorial Fund.

This fall, I had the opportunity to intern at Frontier Group, a non-profit think tank that works on issues in health care, transportation and the environment. Frontier Group is composed of a network of policy analysts around the country who work on a large variety of issues, allowing me the opportunity to make diverse connections and engage with many different issues.

During my internship, my primary focus was working on a report about hospital charges for common surgeries in California and the factors that drive the large variations that we found. Additionally, I wrote blogs for the Frontier Group website which enabled me to address policy issues that I found interesting, develop my views, and help other analysts at Frontier Group with their projects, which ranged from how the Clean Water Act is enforced across the country to the impact of tax exclusions for parking.

Throughout my internship, I drew heavily on my experience working for the Rockefeller Policy Research Shop, where I initially learned how to address policy issues and write briefs to inform better policymaking. The skills I developed there, both in planning for writing a brief and the actual research and writing, provided important groundwork for the skills I learned in working on larger scale reports. Working at Frontier Group also reaffirmed my desire to work in policy research, and I hope to continue working in this field in the future. One of my favorite parts of this internship was looking for policy handles to address the issues that were brought up, and I am now considering moving towards more applied policy work in the future. I would like to thank the Rockefeller Center and the Peter McSpaden ’52 Memorial Fund for supporting this extremely valuable experience – without this support I would not have been able to spend this fall doing work that I find so valuable and engaging, and that I hope will be used to help develop policies in the future.