Ottavia is an Italian international student at Harvard Medical School. She grew up in a small town in northeast Italy, where her family still lives, and she moved to Hong Kong at 17 years old in order to finish high school at Li Po Chun United World College (LPC). After graduating from LPC, she moved to the United States and attended college at UNC-Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Ottavia majored in Public Health with a concentration in Nutrition, and spent most of her time volunteering at UNC Hospitals and working in a lab that studied the connection between obesity and triple negative breast cancer. She also had the privilege of spending her college summers working in a variety of healthcare settings, including Baylor Scott & White Healthcare in Dallas, TX, Ruhengeri Hospital in Musanze, Rwanda, and the NIH. In medical school, Ottavia has become passionate about issues of access to care, care quality and health inequities, especially with regards to the field of oncology, and is pursuing a fifth year of research focusing on these topics. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking and hanging with friends! Talk to Ottavia about any questions you have about med school, and in particular about applying "straight through" (no gap years between college and med school), financial aid in med school, and being on J-1 and F-1 visas!