Zev Braun ’15 (he/him) majored in Biology and concentrated in Neuroscience at Grinnell, on a medical school track. Afterwards, his experiences as an EMT and drug addiction prevention coordinator in Portland, OR, encouraged him to reevaluate that career path. He joined AmeriCorps the following year and that solidified for him this takeaway: “I wanted to work on the systems level to prevent the health and social harms I had witnessed, rather than being constrained to the specific practice of medicine.”
Zev went to public health school for a masters at BU on short notice, loved it, and started working in gun violence prevention in Boston and then back in Portland, OR. After being a part of a campaign that successfully passed a safe storage bill for firearms in Oregon, he transitioned to county suicide prevention coordination. After two years, Zev explains, “I realized that I wanted more influence and expertise in those public policy spaces, so I went to law school (choosing a school in DC because I wanted to learn about federal politics). I just graduated from American University, and I will be working for the next two years or so at the IRS, specifically in the chief counsel group that develops policy and rules for the nonprofit sector—including as they interface with politics.”
About his time at Grinnell, Zev remembers: “So many things, but more than anything the type of people that it produces. No matter the age or life experiences after graduating, I’ve found that I resonate easily with Grinnellians I meet out in the world.”