Match Day 2023: Meet Becky Peoples

I remember telling my mom when I was three years old that I wanted to be a doctor. She said, “Well, it’s going to be hard.” And I knew right then, that’s what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to help people. 

I grew up in gymnastics, and I had more than my fair share of injuries, so my initial exposure to medicine was through sports medicine. In undergrad, I got involved volunteering with athletic training. I worked every football practice and I got to shadow post-game clinics. At that point, I thought I was going to go into sports medicine. 

Then I started to get involved in health policy, and through that, I found that I wanted to do emergency medicine. 

When I got to medical school, I had the opportunity to get involved with leadership through our SNMA (Student National Medical Association), as co-president. SNMA is the student component of an association created as a space for minority physicians to improve the quality of health among minorities and disadvantaged people. I got to work on an Iowa state bill, the Dignity in Pregnancy and Childbirth Act. The intention was to address implicit bias in health care providers who have contact with pregnant people—not just physicians, but nurses, medical assistants, everybody who comes in contact with them. It’s the smallest interactions with people that can have the biggest impact, and there’s already a lot of distrust in the medical system as it is. 

The opportunity to work on that bill opened up this whole field of health policy, which was something I didn’t know I could do with my medical degree. There’s a lot of frustration in the health care system. As much as we want to do for our patients, we are limited, and there are only so many of us. I’m looking forward to spending some of my time, in my future career, working at a broader scale to address some of these issues for patients. 

Also, I think one of my proudest moments is finding the next group of people to lead White Coats for Black Lives. They have really taken it on and made it their own, and it continues to be an organization that is very active and draws members from PA and medical students across all years. 

(Read more about Becky’s involvement founding the Iowa chapter of White Coats for Black Lives.)

I’ve met so many good people here, and I’m so excited to see where everyone ends up and what kind of work they do in the future. My class did not have a single normal year of medical school. In March of 2020, we went off to spring break, and then we got an email on Thursday that said, “You’re going to be online for two weeks, and then we’ll be back.” 

The amount of resiliency and determination it took us to get to this point is going to serve us and our patients well in the future. It’s been amazing getting to know these people and make some lifelong friends that are in a way the only people that get it, because they went through it with me.

My class did not have an emergency med rotation during the core year, but as I was going through my rotations, I think I just liked everything, really. I was trying to find one that felt right. And I think I said I was going to do probably everything at one point or another. 

I had the opportunity to volunteer at Kinnick for one of the football games during my core year, and interacting with the police officers and paramedics really opened my eyes to the way that medicine crosses fields and impacts people on so many different levels. I went home and started looking at all the fellowship options for emergency medicine, and I was like, “I want to do that one, and that one, and that one...”