Student Spotlight: Sean Pomory (MPA-HPAM 2024)

What motivated you to attend the Wagner School of Public Service?

There are so many things that have led to this point in my life. Most recently, I graduated with a masters in religion and ethics from Princeton Seminary in May 2022. I went into that program because of my experience sitting on the Ethics Committee of a public hospital in Virginia and thought it was the best route to a PhD in bioethics.

COVID-19 hit less than a year into that program and the committee was absolutely overwhelmed with a myriad of bioethical problems that were oriented mostly around how to allocate resources well. As I started wrestling with those issues both professionally and academically, it became increasingly clear to me that historically disenfranchised communities were often further pushed to the margins in those discussions. So then my question became: how do we make healthcare more equitable and just, especially for those that continue to be maligned by the present structures?

"I kept wanting to enlarge the conversation to include things beyond the hospital walls; things like housing, education, transportation, and food access—all the things that contribute to positive health outcomes."

I chose Wagner over peer programs because it was one of the few that seemed to consciously integrate health management and policy in fruitful ways. The MPA-Health program really seemed built from the ground up with an understanding that health care is more than just the hospital. Indeed, all the things I wanted to include in discussions of ethics!

What do you hope to gain from the MPA Health Policy and Management program?

I felt like I needed some more hard skills, especially quantitative ones, if I was going to be a real change agent in the healthcare space. Perhaps just as importantly, though, I’m also seeking to further develop my network of co-conspirators seeking to build a better world. It’s really the people that make up a graduate program and listening to different perspectives from my own has always made me a better person and leader. To that end, sitting within a school with so many policymakers and urban planners is a pretty unique experience and it helps to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of deepest problems. We need each other to solve these problems and so much of that relational work begins now.

Any specific courses or student groups that you hope to participate in?

I am a first year rep for the Wagner Consulting Group and I hope to get even more engaged with the Wagner Health Network as well. I also used Prof. Lauren Taylor’s book The American Health Care Paradox in a couple papers in my first graduate program and it’s been really cool to already have a class with her this semester! Beyond that, I’m excited to take courses in health care finance and economics to better understand the interventions available to us.

There are so many avenues that a person can pursue in the health field. Is there a specific area of health that you’re passionate about?

I truly care about hospitals, especially because they should be sites of healing. But, as my Ethics Committee experience has shown me, I tend to understand hospitals in a broader sense than they are understood right now. Hospitals, in my opinion, should be first-rate citizens which seek to improve the health of not just individuals, but the communities they participate in. Part of that is just because of the reality that they sit within an interdependent web of political and economic relations and in order to survive they have to expand their focus beyond just whoever is within the walls of the building at the time. Another part is that I truly believe in a central tenet of liberation theology: the preferential option for the poor. Living this out can take on many authentic forms but it is at the end of the day an attitude which seeks to make things materially better for those most in need.

But in reality, COVID-19 also revealed the precarity of American hospitals and they often just can’t do all the things I would like them to do. So in the near term I’ll likely move out of the hospital space and try to learn more about other provider avenues and hopefully work with payers as well before hopefully being an executive in a health system.