Bennett Burnes, Class of 2018 - A Cardinal to Watch!

Emily: Welcome, Bennett! Tell us a little bit about what you've done since you graduated in 2018.

Bennett: Sure! After my freshman year at Duke, I received a grant from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation to spend the summer in South Africa working at a law firm. I had the opportunity to spend three months there writing up various legal cases and documents.  It was a great experience. I continued working with the law firm for the next three years on a remote basis.

At the start of my sophomore year of college I was the first undergraduate to be selected for the Blasi HIV Vaccine Lab. I spent three years working there and was able to publish two different research papers during that time. It was really an incredible and exciting experience working in one of the most predominant labs. I learned a lot.

During college, I also helped start the NSRN (National Student Response Network) which came about when Covid started. It was basically helping people get access to the Covid vaccine and informing people about it. I did the media aspect and was able to get us on 75 different networks, including CNN. That was a really big one to highlight our work and our outreach.

After college I started working in wealth management. I focus on healthcare investment and I hope to start grad school either next year or the year after to complete a JD/MD. I'd like to go back to work in the intersection between healthcare and the actual practice of it and the legal applications of providing healthcare.

Emily: Wow, you’ve been busy! That's impressive. 

Anna: You definitely accomplished a lot in a short amount of time!

Emily: Tell us more about the South Africa experience. What kind of law were you working on?  

Bennett: It was a nonprofit law firm. We focused on land rights and doing work in South Africa. There is still severe segregation within land there because even when apartheid fell in the 90s, that didn’t suddenly mean that people moved from those segregated areas. To this day there's a lot of work that needs to be done to help desegregate the country. We focused primarily on that. 

In addition, during my time there, just as a passion project, I did a lot of research and helped coordinate with the different low-income communities there because South Africa has the highest rates of HIV of any country in the world. Providing access for clinics to come and provide testing or treatment for those already infected was kind of an extension of my work when I was already working in those communities there with the law firm.

Emily: That must have been pretty profound. 

Bennett: Yeah, it was hard and definitely emotionally taxing to say the least but it's a very important thing. I'm very glad that I was able to make that contribution and I really thank Bishop for instilling that desire to give back and make a positive contribution to the world. That's something I've been trying to continuously do since graduating from Bishop. 

Anna: Do you have any specific plans for or ideas of where you do want to get your JD/MD? 

Bennett: I’m in the application process, so I’m not 100% sure yet. 

Emily: So you're in the process of applying for a JD/MD program now.  What does a JD/MD program look like? I assume it’s a long and intensive program? 

Bennett: Yes, because there’s not a lot of people who do it, when you get accepted, you work with them to structure it. You can start with either the JD or the MD. I'm likely going to start with my MD and then do the legal work during my medical residency.  

Emily: That's probably going to be, what, seven or eight years?

Bennett:  Yeah it will be about seven or eight years and then once I get into medicine - I haven't 100% picked what I will do my residency in, but it will probably be infectious diseases, which is three additional years.

Anna: Oh wow, in addition to the regular MD?

Bennett: Yes, on top of that. 

Emily: So to clarify, you don’t know that you’ll necessarily practice medicine at this point. You’re looking at law and medicine together?

Bennett: I don't envision myself practicing medicine but I envision a career where I apply that information and knowledge. It would probably be an advisory role or in healthcare policy. Potentially as a lobbyist or somewhere in DC advising people and policy makers. There is so much overlap between how medicine is practiced and all the legal intricacies of how that gets applied in the world.

Emily: When did you know that's what you wanted to do? 

Bennett: I knew in high school, my junior year. I always loved science and I went through college as a biology and public policy major, but it was Mr Crawford's AP Government class where I became fascinated with it. That was also kind of the same time that Obamacare was being rolled out and there were a lot of legal things that began to appear as the government stepped in as a provider of healthcare. 

Emily: If you don’t mind going back a little, I'm curious about the vaccine lab and the research papers you did. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Bennett:  Yeah, so we were working on finding a vaccine for HIV at the lab and we went through all the steps of it. I started with trying to find the vector, which is basically the thing that attaches and identifies the infection, so the vaccine can do its work and kill it before it infects the person. That was my primary focus. During the pandemic, which was the middle of my lab experience, we switched over to do some Covid research for a couple months. In that research what we did was take samples of patients at Duke Hospital and tried to find if you could test for Covid infection through urine analysis. So we did that work and then once life started to get a little bit more normal we went back to our lab research on the HIV vaccine. 

Emily: Do you enjoy that component of it, do you like the research?

Bennett: Yeah I definitely liked it. I was very fortunate as I was the only undergrad to be allowed into the lab, but that being said I was with a lot of MDs and PhDs, so I was kind of at the bottom totem pole. I got the 6 a.m. shift every single day, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. I learned so much and I got to work with the Dean of Duke Medicine very closely and establish a really good relationship with her. That has helped me tremendously in getting the current job I have. 

Anna: Awesome. Do you want to just tell us a little bit more about your college experience and how you felt prepared to do big things like your research at such a young time in your undergrad years?

Bennett: I definitely attribute that all to Ms. Williams. She really worked with me and gave me the best preparation of my writing capability so I could go into my freshman year with the confidence to publish papers. I remember, my senior year, I would get so frustrated with her because I would get A’s on my papers and then she would give them back to me and tell me to rewrite it. She goes, “Well you could do better than this.” At the moment I was so annoyed, I'm like, I already have other things to do. But it was that preparation that made me such a strong writer. I remember my first semester of college, I was in my writing one-on-one class and my professor said to me after he handed back our first paper, “You must have had one heck of a high school English teacher. I've never seen a freshman with a literary discipline like you have.” I told the professor that yes, I had a pretty incredible high school English teacher.

Emily:  It's amazing how that makes a difference. What you have to look forward to next year, Anna!!

Anna: Hopefully!

Emily: What were some of the challenges when you got to college? You’ve talked about feeling prepared in English. Were there things that were harder in making that leap? 

Bennett: Really, I was surprised, I felt incredibly prepared for everything that I did. I had a really strong math background from Mrs. Adam and a really strong English background. I went into a double major in public policy and biology, so that STEM and science foundation really helped me. I felt a thousand percent prepared. The only challenge, I guess, was I didn't know anyone in North Carolina when I got there, but by the first week I met all my best friends and everything became super, super easy.

Anna: How do you feel that specific experiences at Bishop or just your high school experience outside of Bishop prepared you for the next step, specifically at an elite level school like Duke?

Bennett: (Editor’s note: Bennett also worked in the Duke admissions office as an undergrad and now serves as an alumni interviewer for applicants.) What I would say to that is I've seen and heard, through interviewing so many people's stories, of super bright kids with all the perfect scores, perfect grades, everything, and they don't get into Duke. At that level, yes, you need to have that academic preparation - the good grades, the good scores, all that. But you need to kind of be different from the other thousands and thousands of kids who have that same background. Bishop provided me with that flexibility. Some years, I would take one to two independent studies and with that time I took classes at city college, I took a class at UCSB, and I worked on a Congressional Campaign. So really, just working with the Bishop faculty and their willingness to help people with that flexibility to go out into the community and do something that aligns with your interest and what excites you. Work with them to do something that's going to be different than just a generic smart kid from a school. The admissions officer sees a million of those kids.

Emily: That's great advice for kids looking to go to more of an elite school. You really have to differentiate yourself somehow.

Bennett: Bishop provides that flexibility since it's a smaller community. I remember I talked with Ms. Carpenter a lot to work on getting those free periods to allow me to do things outside of Bishop. That is a huge benefit that I don't think a lot of people take advantage of but it really takes the student being very proactive. You can't just show up and be like “Hey, I want to take off two periods in the middle of the day,” and expect that to happen. But if you give a really clear plan that these are the classes I'm going to take, this is what I'm going to do with my time, at least in my experience I found that worked very, very well. I was able to do those things because I came prepared with a really detailed plan of how I was going to spend that time.

Emily: I think that's an important point. If kids have a real goal for that time and a plan, that makes a big difference as to whether they can have that flexibility.

Generally speaking, what other advice do you have for kids in high school? Is there anything else, if you could go back to your high school self, that you would have told yourself then?

Bennett: I actually have two parts to that answer. The first one is really just to enjoy being in Santa Barbara. If these kids want to move, most of the good schools are on the East Coast, you are going to really miss the weather in this beautiful city. That hit me like a ton of bricks my first snow day, so just really enjoy it.

Secondly, a bad grade on one test is not the end of the world. It's not going to change anything. Just really cultivate those relationships with your high school friends. My best friends to this day are all my Bishop friends. I still have my college friends, who I absolutely love, but there's something about growing up with people. I just got back from a trip in Hawaii with my best friend from Bishop and we had so much fun reminiscing about all those days. I'm going to Europe with a handful of my closest Bishop friends at the end of the month for my birthday and it's just so fun to have that connection because there's nothing like knowing someone from before, when we were all so young, and now seeing them as adults and thriving. It's just such a deep bond.

Emily: That's awesome, that's good to hear that you guys still get together! Tell us about what you’re doing now. You're in a wealth management situation? Is that to learn more of the financial side behind health care or…? 

Bennett: I work mostly in health investment. I just knew that I want to do the JD/MD and that's a lot of school. So after college graduation, I decided I wanted to take two to three years to get out of school for a little bit and make some money before I go back in for another decade. I guess that's another piece of advice that I want to give people. It's good to take off a couple years. I realized, once I was about to start Duke Med right when I graduated, that I haven't had more than two weeks off from classes since I started high school at Bishop. Every summer I took classes, so my longest break was winter break. I decided I should really take off a little bit of time so I'm not in school constantly for decades.

Emily: That's a really smart idea. You had the foresight to pause and live life for a couple of years. 

Bennett: I didn't want to burn out. I loved Duke, but it was really, really hard academically so I thought I’d give myself a break. Work is hard, but it's just a different type of stress.

Emily: So you felt academically prepared at Duke and like you were prepared to compete with your peers there?

Bennett: I one hundred percent felt that. I was nervous when I was going to Duke because I was on the waitlist and got off at the very end, so I kind of came in with that self-doubt about being at the bottom of the totem pole. Then I met all these kids and all of them went to these very elite boarding schools. I was scared that I wasn't going to be able to compete with them, but I ended up with a 4.0 in the two hardest majors and I was academically a thousand percent prepared. 

Emily: That's so good to hear. Thanks to Mrs. Adam, Ms. Williams, Mr. Crawford, all those great teachers! 

Bennett, it has been so nice to speak with you. We really appreciate your time!

Anna: Any final words you’d like to share with the students at Bishop? 

Bennett: One more piece of, I guess, wisdom, to the students in particular, is to continue to work on those relationships with your teachers after high school. Specifically with Ms. Williams, I communicated with her all through college - got advice and it was so helpful. So that's just a really important thing I found with all my Bishop teachers. They're so happy to give you advice or just to hear how you're doing. It’s really a great thing for students to do once they depart from Bishop and go off into the real world. Keep those relationships going.

Emily: That's a great point I'm sure she was helpful with some college writing!

Bennett: Absolutely.

Emily: Thank you so much, Bennett! We’re so excited to see what you do in the coming years. Best of luck!