Evan Bowman came to Yale with a clear path already mapped out: to be premed, with a focus on public health.
Her commitment to that specialty began in ninth grade, when she did a public health internship at a university near her home in Los Angeles. That led her to another internship as a peer health educator at an organization called Black Women for Wellness, which then led to a position on the youth advisory council at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
“I just really enjoyed the work of connecting with people about their health and providing them with resources,” said Bowman, who is graduating from Yale with a degree in History of Medicine & Science and Public Health and, as planned, will attend medical school next fall.
That appreciation only deepened at Yale, especially after what Bowman describes as a “transformative” study-abroad experience in the spring of 2024. Through a program focused on global health, she traveled to India, South Africa, and Argentina, studying local health systems in each location.
Bowman at the Taj Mahal.
In a small town outside of Buenos Aires, she witnessed volunteer community health workers connecting with residents by visiting them at home to do health checks. A map in the community health center showed every home in town; the volunteers used pushpins to denote health issues pertinent to each location.
“It really opened my eyes in the sense that it demonstrated that health care doesn’t have to be based in the hospital,” Bowman said. “It can be based in the community, in the home. We can be much more connected than we are. There was a sense there that my neighbor’s health depends on my health, and my health depends on my neighbor’s health — we’re all in this together.”
When she returned to the U.S., she discovered that L.A.’s Department of Public Health was piloting a very similar concept in 10 pockets of L.A. County. Bowman began working with the department to help document how the project is going and write tool kits for future programming. And as part of her senior project, she researched how such initiatives travel across borders and gain viability — especially when, as in this case, they move from the global south to the global north, rather than vice versa.
All that work hasn’t kept Bowman from being deeply immersed in campus life. She is the Global Health Ethics Program Student Fellow with the Yale Global Health Institute, where she helps organize the Global Health Ethics Network at Yale and is conducting a review of ethics training for premed students.
She also served on the executive board of the Yale Black Solidarity Conference for two years. The student-run conference, held every February in venues across Yale’s campus, attracts hundreds of students from campuses across the country.
And she co-founded a club called Yale Undergraduate Humanities in Medicine Celebrations, or HuMed, to promote work at the intersection of humanities and medicine.
“I realized there are a lot of us who are interested in combining and blending humanities and medicine, or humanities and science, in our careers or the arts, and we didn’t have a real place for that on campus,” she said.
As she prepares to leave Yale behind for medical school at Howard University, Bowman says she will miss her sorority, Xi Omicron, a citywide chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, that took her to campuses across New Haven, and the strong communities she found at Timothy Dwight College and the Afro-American Cultural Center.
She still recalls the intuition she had about Yale when she was making her college decision — and is pleased that she trusted in that insight.
“I knew that I wanted to be premed and to study public health, but I also really wanted the liberal arts curriculum. I wanted to be able to explore,” she said. “What really solidified it was visiting and seeing how joyful people here were. I felt like this was a place where I’d be really happy for my four years.”
