• The US has seen several of mass shootings in recent months, continuing debates about gun control.
• Some countries have figured out how to curb gun violence through targeted strategies.
• Efforts in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom may all offer insight.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Over the weekend, two mass shootings occurred. A 21-year-old gunman entered a Walmart on Saturday in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring 26 more. In Dayton, Ohio, a gunman killed nine people and injured 27 others, just 13 hours later.

Last week, on July 28, a gunman opened fire at a food festival in Gilroy, California, killing three people and injuring 12 others.

As shootings like these continue in the US, so do questions about gun control. Americans who fear their town or city could be the site of the next attack wonder what strategies the US could take to reduce gun violence.

No country has the same political structure as the US, but several have taken steps that worked for them. Here are their insights.

Australia paid citizens to sell their guns to the government.

A spate of violence in the 1980s and '90s that culminated in a 1996 shooting that left 35 dead led Australian Prime Minister John Howard to convene an assembly to devise gun-control strategies.

The group landed on a massive buyback program, costing hundreds of millions of dollars offset by a one-time tax increase, that bought and destroyed more than 600,000 automatic and semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns.

Over the next few years, gun-death totals were cut nearly in half. Firearm suicides dropped to 0.8 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 2.2 in 1995, while firearm homicides dropped to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 0.37 in 1995.

A US buyback would mean destroying more than 40 million guns— but at the state level, the undertaking might not be so massive.

The United Kingdom took a multipronged approach.

The UK's approach combines elements from Norway, Australia, and Japan's policies.

Around when Australia adopted its gun regulations, UK Parliament passed legislation banning private ownership of handguns in Britain and banned semiautomatic and pump-action firearms throughout the UK. It also required shotgun owners to register their weapons.

A $200 million buyback program led to the government's purchase of 162,000 guns and 700 tons of ammunition from citizens.

GunPolicy.org estimates that in 2010 there were 3.78 guns per 100 people in the UK, while the US, meanwhile, is estimated to have 101 guns per 100 people.

The result has been roughly 50 to 60 gun deaths a year in England and Wales, which have a population of 56 million. Compare that to the US, a country about six times as large that has more than 160 times as many gun-related homicides.

Japan puts citizens through a rigorous set of tests.

Japan, which has strict laws for obtaining firearms, seldom has more than 10 shooting deaths a year in a population of 127 million people.

If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test.

Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation at a hospital, as well as a background check, in which the government digs into any criminal records or ties and interviews friends and family members.

Finally, they can buy only shotguns and air rifles — no handguns — and must retake the class and the initial exam every three years.

Norway exemplifies the power of social cohesion and trust.

Compared with the US, Norway has about one-third of the number of guns per 100 civilians — and about one-tenth of the rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people.

Sociologists who study the Nordic model have found that social cohesion between citizens and the government goes a long way toward ensuring a (mostly) peaceful society.

For example, an analysis in 2015 found that the number of fatal shootings by police in Norway in the past nine years was less than the number of fatal shootings by US police officers in one day.

Gummi Oddsson, a cross-cultural sociologist from Northern Michigan University, has found that Nordic governments go to great lengths to build trust in local communities.

He told Business Insider that US states could look to strengthen a sense of trust through measures like community policing, a tactic that emphasizes partnership between law enforcement and communities.

The thinking goes that people will begin to feel safer around the police, who will then have a better understanding of the neighborhood and be able to address problems before they happen.

New Zealand is instituting a policy similar to Australia's.

Most recently, New Zealand has instituted a ban on semi-automatic rifles after a mass shooting in Christchurch left 51 people dead and dozens more injured in March 2019. The gunman, a self-professed white supremacist, targeted two mosques during a Friday prayer with semi-automatic weapons.

Six days later, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the ban. The country had the first of a scheduled 250 buyback events for the year just three weeks ago. 

"On 15 March our history changed forever. Now, our laws will too," Prime Minister Ardern said in a press conference. "We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place."

Experts say a nationwide ban on assault weapons wouldn't work in the US due to the influential gun lobby, which has helped to strike down other gun control legislation.

"They don't have an NRA," Gregory Koger, a University of Miami political science professor, told INSIDER. "There's no organization of gun owners and gun companies that systematically and persistently opposes regulations of guns."

• The shooter responsible for 20 deaths in a Walmart in El Paso may have sought to target immigrant and Hispanic people.
• The city is home to one of the largest shares of Hispanic people in the US, and more of the city speaks Spanish than English.
• The region also saw a 547% surge in migrant apprehensions— or ICE arrests — in 2019.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

El Paso, the Texas city that was the site of a mass shooting at a Walmart this weekend, is one of the largest hubs for Latino and Hispanic people in the country.

Authorities say the shooter is a 21-year-old white male who may have circulated an anti-immigrant manifesto hours before the attack. The document expresses fears of "a Hispanic invasion of Texas," and that immigrants would turn it into a "Democrat stronghold." Police are currently working to confirm whether the suspected shooter penned the online statement.

As of this writing, Texas officials say 26 people were wounded and 21 died during the mass shooting, including seven Mexican citizens. 

Read more:Here are the 22 US cities and towns with more Spanish than English speakers

El Paso sits directly across the border from Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. The city was 83% Hispanic or Latino as of July 1, 2018, according to the US Census Bureau, while a quarter of residents were foreign-born. 

Furthermore, nearly 70% of El Paso speaks Spanish, making it one of just 22 US cities and towns with more Spanish speakers than English speakers.

El Paso is also the estimated 38th largest city with the most unauthorized immigrants, according to Pew Hispanic. The El Paso region saw a 547% surge in migrant apprehensions— or ICE arrests — in the first half of fiscal year 2019, and so far ranks second in the number of total arrests this year.

El Paso currently hosts one of the largest enclosures to house largely Central American migrants crossing the Mexican border to seek asylum, as 570 people cross the area each day on average.

"If you look at the numbers from March, there was over 100,000 people that came across the borders. Roughly 53,000 of those individuals were family units, and 39,000 were children," US Customs and Border Protection commissioner John Sanders told Business Insider's Graham Flanagan earlier this year. "So it's truly unprecedented, the numbers that we're seeing come across."

Many politicians and pundits called the act as one motivated by white nationalism, including Democratic presidential candidate from El Paso, Beto O'Rourke. The former Congressman criticized Donald Trump's anti-Latino rhetoric as inciting violence and racism.

When asked by CNN whether he thinks Trump is a white nationalist, O'Rourke agreed and added, "We have a problem with white nationalist terrorism in the United States of America today. These are white men motivated by the kind of fear that this President traffics in."

SEE ALSO: Trump accused the US media of perpetuating 'anger and rage' after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton

Join the conversation about this story »

• We asked professional résumé writers and career consultants for one thing they want people to know about crafting a résumé that will land the job.
• Small mistakes on a résumé can be off-putting to recruiters.
• A strong résumé should answer the "so what?" question and give context to past experiences.
• Experts also say a résumé should be persuasive, not boastful.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Résumés: Nobody likes writing them. 

But unless you're, say, a cranberry bog harvester or a deep sea fisherman, chances are you're going to need one. 

The art of writing the perfect résumé, however, is a mysterious one. There are countless small variables to consider. And opinions on what you should and shouldn't put on a résumé vary drastically. Should you include your date of college graduation? Some would say absolutely. Others would say that's a rookie mistake. 

So where is a hapless job seeker to turn for solid advice on what makes a great CV? To the experts, of course. In an effort to dispel the shroud of mystery — and anxiety — that shrouds crafting a résumé for many people, we tapped a group of professional career coaches and résumé writers for the one thing they wish job applicants knew about résumés.

Here's their best advice.

SEE ALSO: How to introduce your significant other to your coworkers, according to an expert

DON'T MISS: How I doubled the amount of work I do with one simple change to my daily routine

"Make sure your resume doesn't read like a job description"

While you need to make it clear what you do at your current job and did at your past jobs, a résumé shouldn't read like a laundry list of duties, Timothy Lo, cofounder of the business consulting firm Your Next Jump, told Business Insider. 

"It's very common for résumés to read like a list of the person's tasks, day-to-day activities, roles and responsibilities, how many people they manage, and the size or type of budget they manage," Lo said.

"While there is definitely a place for all of that information — you have to establish context after all — what tends to differentiate a candidate from the pool, and what we find what most employers are really looking for, is answering the 'so what?' question. So you do all of these things. That's great, but so what? What were the outcomes? What were the results? Those things you did, what did they lead to? You don't want your résumé to just talk about what you do or did, but rather, you want to emphasize how well you do it. You want to show that no matter what you do, you're going to be really good at it." 

"I wish people knew how off-putting small mistakes are"

Spell-check is your friend, according to Paden Simmons, senior vice president of Nigel Frank International, a leading Microsoft recruitment firm. 

"Spelling and grammar errors are, largely speaking, avoidable, and simply point towards a careless attitude that always leaves doubts about your desire to land the job," Simmons said. 

"Similarly, any dates that don't match, or contradict other parts of your résumé, will either raise alarm bells that they're untrue or that you've rushed your application, which isn't a great trait to be revealing at this stage of the hiring process. That's not to say you can't overcome them, but they create such an unnecessary stumbling block at a time when you most want to be making a good impression."

"A résumé needs to be clearly focused"

A big mistake that many job seekers make is being too vague, according to Martin Yate, of Knock Em Dead, a résumé and career coaching service. 

"It should be based on what the customer wants to buy, reflecting what you bring to the table with each requirement," Yate said. "Not doing this is why résumés sink to the bottom of résumé databases, never to be seen again." 

You shouldn't include "too much styling"

Sometimes less is more, founder of New York branding and consulting firm Point Road Group Alyssa Gelbard told Business Insider. 

"Résumés are reviewed very quickly, so while you want to make things clear and easy to read with certain formatting enhancements, you also don't want to include too much styling, which becomes visually distracting," Gelbard said. "An overly formatted résumé — one with liberal use of boxes, borders, shading, font styles, colors, et cetera— is challenging to read because it's busy and the reader's eye doesn't know where to go. As a result, key details and messaging can get lost, which impacts the impression you make on a potential employer or key contact."

"You'd be surprised at how many candidates forget the basics"

Sometimes candidates can get so wrapped up in the details that they neglect the most basic information, according to Anthony Fletcher, founder of Chicago-based executive search firm My Future Consulting. 

"For example, listing significant accomplishments and dates of employment," Fletcher said. "And simply ensuring everything is spelled correctly — I've even seen résumés where candidates have misspelled their own names!"

"Keep it clean"

"A lot of résumés are cluttered, full of paragraphs, the formatting is inconsistent," said Stephanie Dennis, career coach and host of the podcast "Career Talk." 

"When a résumé is cluttered and messy, it's hard to consume the information on it quickly. We are looking at each résumé for seconds, so for the best chance to move forward, the résumé needs to … easily and quickly determine if there is a potential fit."

"I wish everyone knew that recruiters are also humans"

Sure, sending a résumé into one of those online portals can feel extremely impersonal. But Tom Gerencer, career and workplace expert at Zety, said applicants should remember that a very human HR professional is on the other end of that portal. 

And those humans aren't so keen on your buzzwords.

 "Often over the sixth cup of coffee, (recruiters) go through hundreds of applications coming from 'go-getters' and 'best of breed achievers.' Job seekers should keep in mind that the popular résumé buzzwords got worn out and don't impress the recruiters anymore," Gerencer said. "They look for words that convey specific information. They're not interested in what type of 'ninja' you are, they look at what you've achieved and if it's measurable."

"So providing specific information without bragging and imitating hundreds of other applications will definitely score a candidate extra points, while being refreshing and pleasant to read." 

"You can get creative with your resume"

"When I first started out, I thought that all résumés had to look standard in order to be taken seriously. Over time, I've learned that it's okay, and in some industries, expected for you to get creative," Kayla Kelly, executive marketer at workforce management firm Paypro, told Business Insider. 

"Employers are receiving so many résumés for each posting that standing out, in a good way, can certainly help you get a callback. Think about different formats, adding shapes or colors." 

She does, however, align with Gelbard on one point:

 "You just want to be sure that it still looks professional and clean." 

"It's all about persuasion"

Make yourself invaluable. But do it smoothly. 

"Your résumé shouldn't be a bragging post for your accomplishments, it should be the long-awaited solution to the hiring manager's vacancy," Olivia Jaras, founder of Salary Coaching for Women, told Business Insider.

"Share some of your interests"

While of course you shouldn't divulge a love for an activity like weekend binge drinking, including a section for hobbies on a résumé can make you more attractive as a candidate, according to Sean Sessel, founder and director of the The Oculus Institute. 

"When your résumé actually does get to a human being, this section will allow them to relate to you and imagine themselves working with you, which is what really matters at the end of the day," Sessel said.

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• The 14 most common work-from-home jobs in America, and how much money you can make doing them

• Many of the deadliest mass-shooting perpetrators have a history of threatening, committing, or verbalizing domestic violence.
• Perpetrators of domestic violence are supposed to be barred from buying guns nationwide.
• High-capacity firearms have been relatively easy for recent killers to get their hands on.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump made his first public remarks after two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger — not the gun," Trump said, arguing that the US must reform mental health laws.

Trump also suggested that mental illness is to blame for the killings that happened at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in Texas in November 2017.

But scientists say the real problem is that violent, impulsive, and angry men are getting their hands on guns.

Many of the shooters behind the deadliest mass shootings in modern America (listed below) committed violence against women, threatened violence against women, or disparaged women.

According to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of mass shootings in the US are in some way related to domestic or family violence. A 2018 Everytown report indicates that in at least 54% of mass shootings, the perpetrator also shot a current or former intimate partner or family member.

A former classmate of Connor Betts, the shooter behind the Dayton, Ohio, shooting told CNN that Betts kept a "rape list" for girls and a "kill list" for boys. Another former classmate said Betts would talk about violence and use harsh language about women. On Sunday, Betts shot his own sister dead. 

Perpetrators of domestic violence are legally barred from buying guns, according to federal law. But many have been able to get high-capacity firearms anyway.

The shooter in the Texas church, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, was kicked out of the Air Force for "bad conduct" years ago. That conduct included assaulting his wife and her child.

The Air Force never reported those details to the FBI, even though the Pentagon requires convicts like Kelley to be added to a federal database for gun-background checks. Kelley also sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law, who attended the church where the shooting happened on Sunday.

Many mass shooters in recent history had a history of violence against women

Forensic psychiatrist Liza Gold, who teaches psychiatry at Georgetown and edited the book "Gun Violence and Mental Illness," previously told Business Insider that mass shooters tend to be "impulsive and angry about a lot of different things" and many have a history with law enforcement or violence, especially domestic violence.

A 2017 report from the Department of Homeland Security on "mass attacks" in public spaces found similarly that "almost half" of the attackers studied that year were motivated by personal grievances, retaliating for various perceived slights, including being bullied, disliked, or wronged by peers or family members. It's a phenomenon that other researchers have noticed, too.

"Most mass murders are planned well in advance of the outburst, usually as acts of revenge or retribution for perceived slights and wrongs," psychiatrist Michael Stone noted in a 2015 report on "mass murder, mental illness, and men." 

Betts and Kelley are just two examples. Omar Mateen, the man who carried out the Orlando shooting at the Pulse Nightclub, reportedly beat his wife and called her the Afghan word for "slut." And both the shooters in San Bernardino and the recent Las Vegas killings at Mandalay Bay had stalked or abused women.

The mass shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, was committed by a man who'd threatened to kill his mother years before he gunned her and 26 other people down at an elementary school. Another mass shooting took place in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when a man drove his pickup truck though the front window at Luby's Cafeteria shouting, "All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers!"

The one exception on the above list of the deadliest mass shootings is last weekend's El Paso shooting at a Walmart. It's being investigated as a hate crime and act of domestic terrorism fueled by racist, anti-immigrant sentiments. 

The US government long barred scientists at the CDC from researching gun violence (in 2018, Congress said the US government could fund research into gun violence, as long as it did not promote gun control). But a now decades-long trend is clear: Violent, armed perpetrators of domestic violence are a deadly force in America.

SEE ALSO: Trump called the shooting in Texas a 'mental-health issue’ — but scientific evidence says otherwise

Join the conversation about this story »

• More than half of American women participate in the workforce, but the gender wage gap still exists.
• However, women across many different industries can still earn good salaries.
• Here are the 20 highest-paying jobs for women.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Women are increasingly joining the workforce in America — roughly 57% of American women participated in the workforce in 2017, compared to 69.1% of men. 

The gender wage gap is pervasive in many industries, especially those still dominated by men. According to data collected by the US Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey, women earned, on average, 82% of what men earned. Though this is a large increase from year's past — women working full time earned 62% of what men earned in 1979 — the gender wage gap does still exist. 

However, there are some fields where women not only make up a high percentage of the workforce, but they earn competitive pay doing it.

Business Insider looked at data from the US Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey to find occupations with the highest median pay for women who work full-time, year-round and are over the age of 16.

To highlight jobs in which women frequently work, only those where at least 40% of workers identified as female were included. Median annual salaries were found by multiplying the median weekly salaries for each profession by 52, the number of weeks in a year.

Check out the full list of jobs where women earn the most:

SEE ALSO: Equal pay for equal work is not the way to close the gender pay gap

DON'T MISS: The 19 jobs in the US with the biggest gender pay gaps

20. Medical and health services manager

Percentage of women: 71%

Median pay: $61,204

19. Public relations specialist

Percentage of women: 75%

Median annual pay: $70,251

18. Postsecondary teachers

Percentage of women: 44%

Median annual pay: $62,816

17. Operations research analyst

Percentage of women: 51%

Median annual pay: $62,660

16. Speech-language pathologist

Percentage of women: 96%

Median annual pay: $63,128

15. Financial manager

Percentage of women: 55%

Median annual pay: $63,544

14. Education administrator

Percentage of women: 62%

Median annual pay: $64,636

13. Medical scientist

Percentage of women: 49%

Median annual pay: $66,040

12. Computer systems analyst

Percentage of women: 40%

Median annual pay: $$66,040

11. Human resources manager

Percentage of women: 69%

Median annual pay: $66,560

10. Marketing and sales manager

Percentage of women: 43%

Median annual pay: $66,976

9. Management analyst

Percentage of women:42%

Median annual pay: $68,380

8. Financial analyst

Percentage of women: 41%

Median annual pay: $71,188

7. Physical scientist

Percentage of women: 45%

Median annual pay: $73,268

6. Psychologist

Percentage of women: 67%

Median annual pay: $74,724

5. Physician assistant

Percentage of women:68%

Median annual pay: $85,280

4. Lawyer

Percentage of women: 43%

Median annual pay: $91,156

3. Physician and surgeon

Percentage of women: 43%

Median annual pay: $91,468

2. Nurse practitioner

Percentage of women: 91%

Median annual pay: $95,264

1. Pharmacist

Percentage of women: 58%

Median annual pay: $95,368

• Read more:
• 6 charts that show the glaring gap between men and women's salaries
• 43 jobs that are dominated by women
• These are the 37 jobs in the US where women earn more than men
• 12 surprising women from history who paved the road to equal pay

• Nerves can often get the best of you in the 15 minutes leading up to a job interview.
• This short time frame can be an excellent opportunity to review your notes, relax, and put your best foot forward.
• Here are 17 things you should always do in the 15 minutes before a job interview.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The 15 minutes before a job interview can be harrowing, especially for job seekers who aren't sure what to do with that time. 

"Those 15 minutes are your opportunity to get yourself into the right frame of mind, and set your energy and focus on who you'll be meeting with, what you want them to remember about you, and what you want to ask them," says Deborah Shane, a professional branding strategist and author of "Career Transition."

Read more:10 expert tips for wowing a hiring manager to land the job of your dreams

Here are 17 things you should do in the 15 minutes before a job interview to help you land the job.

SEE ALSO: 19 unprofessional habits that could cost you a job

DON'T MISS: 15 questions you should always ask yourself before accepting a new job

1. Arrive early, but don't go inside

Few things can shake you more than running late to an interview, so always arrive early. But be sure to wait in your car or a nearby café, as being too early can place unnecessary pressure on your interviewer and start the meeting off on the wrong foot, says David Parnell, a legal consultant, communication coach, and author of "The Failing Law Firm: Symptoms and Remedies."

Rita Friedman, a Philadelphia-based career coach, says you shouldn't walk into the office building more than 10 minutes early. "It can come across as an imposition, as if you are expecting the interviewer to drop whatever he or she is doing to attend to you."

2. Stay calm

When you become stressed, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine. Depending on the level of your stress, these can slightly or greatly inhibit your ability to think clearly, Parnell says. 

"Ensuring that you remain calm, collected, and cool in the minutes leading up to the interview is necessary to avoid this hormonal elixir, and keep your mind clear," he says.

Career coach Anita Attridge agrees. She says staying calm before and during an interview allows you to listen better and to stay focused on how to best respond to questions. 

"In addition, you are better able to think how you can best present your accomplishments in alignment with what is important to the interviewer — and being calm also demonstrates your ability to deal with stressful situations."

3. Breathe

This will help you remain calm. "Counting your breath is one of the most immediate and impactful techniques for calming your nerves," Parnell says. "Simply focus on your breaths, counting each until you reach 10, and repeat."

4. Briefly review your notes

Before the interview, you should write on a few note cards some key information like your interviewers' names, titles, and relationships to the position, Attridge suggests. Also include answers to questions you hope you won't be asked so you can worry less about them, as well as your pitch for when someone says, "Tell me about yourself."

Take the 15 minutes before the interview to review these notes. "You don't want to walk in asking for 'Jim' when you really mean 'John,'" Friedman says.

5. But don't do any additional research

You should be done researching, preparing, and rehearsing. "This is not the time to be using your phone to look up the company's recent achievements or earnings report. Giving big numbers of projects a glance at the last second is a good way to misinterpret key information," Friedman says.

6. Don't check your voicemail or email

You may hear or read something that will get you all worked up, Shane says. It will distract you and throw you off your game, which is one of the worst things that can happen.

7. But do check Twitter or the companies' LinkedIn

"Take a glance at the company's Twitter feed just to make sure no major game changers or hot topics have popped up since you did your research," Friedman says. "If something relevant has started trending in the last couple of hours, you don't necessarily have to be the one to bring it up, but you'll want to appear in-the-know in case it's what everyone is focused on."

8. Decide on one or two things you want to be remembered for

Is it your communications skills? Project management skills? Knowledge? "Keying in on a few things that will impact your memorability and likeability is a smart way to approach the interview," Shane says.

9. But stop rehearsing

You don't want to use this time to over-prepare or rehearse responses, which can make your conversation seem scripted and inauthentic. "You want to know your stuff, but remember your interview is a conversation. Trust that you know what you know and that the interview will take on a flow of its own," Shane says.

10. Organize your bag

"Make sure you can easily pull the copies of your resume out of your bag without rummaging through it or exposing any personal items," Friedman suggests. "You don't want to look disorganized while you're presenting your qualifications."

11. Look in a mirror

Duck into a nearby restroom to check yourself out in the mirror, Friedman suggests. "You may have left the house looking like a million dollars, but you could still arrive looking like a vagabond."

This is also a great time to wash your hands and make sure your fingernails are clean and your palms are dry. If you wore comfortable shoes and plan on changing into dress shoes, be sure not to do this in the office.

12. Be friendly to all receptionists and security guards

When you do finally walk into the office's waiting room, remember to be nice to the receptionist, security guards, or whoever greets you. "It's very likely that he or she will be reporting back to the hiring manager about how you behaved," Friedman says.

13. Focus on your posture

Sit in a power pose while waiting to go in for your job interview. "You'll come across as looking more confident and poised," Friedman says. 

14. Notice what is happening around you

Observe what the office environment feels like, what's on the walls, and what mementos are in the reception area. " These indicate what is important to the company," Attridge says.

15. Drink water

It's always a good idea to bring along some water with you. The receptionist will usually ask you if you would like some prior to your interview, but bringing your own is always a safe call.

Having a sip of water will cool you down and soothe your voice before you begin telling the hiring coordinator about all of your accomplishments. Plus, if you do need water during the interview, you don't want to have to interrupt it in order to get some from out of the room!

16. Brainstorm one more question for the interviewer

You should already have a couple of questions ready to ask your interviewer at the end of your time together. However, before you go into the interview, see if you can think of any others that come up.

It could be as simple as asking about the resources available in the office and how that plays into the company culture i.e. "I noticed you have quite a few conference rooms and group workspaces — is there a lot of collaboration between team members?"

17. Think happy thoughts

This may sound cliché – but thinking of pleasant things that make you smile and feel good will help put you in the right state of mind going into the interview. 

• Read more:
• 24 psychological tricks that will help you ace a job interview
• The ultimate guide to nailing your job interview
• Here are the answers to job interview questions from 20 of America's top companies, from candidates who know
• The 32 smartest questions to ask at the end of every job interview

• Jerry Colonna is a former startup investor who has been a renowned CEO coach for the last 12 years, and has worked with an estimated 500 clients.
• His "agenda" exercise is a simple but effective way to identify the root of an individual's conflict, whether big or small.
• C-Suite Insider is a collection of exclusive interviews with leaders of the world's largest companies.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

CEO coach Jerry Colonna believes that if you're struggling as a leader, a fix is likely not going to come from a simple adjustment to your workflow or budget: You're going to have to dig deep and determine what aspect of your mindset is holding you back.

Over the past 12 years, Colonna has built a reputation, primarily in Silicon Valley, for the effectiveness of his approach. He estimates that over that time he's had over 500 clients, including founders of companies like Etsy, SoundCloud, and Twilio.

Colonna recently sat down with Business Insider to discuss his career as a prominent venture capitalist turned coach, and his new book, "Reboot," which is also the name of his coaching firm. He joked with us that his approach can't be distilled into something like "5 steps to being a great leader," since he believes leadership has to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Still, he's developed a set of general exercises — and you don't have to be a CEO to use them.

A simple one he uses early in the process is an agenda breakdown.

"What I often will do is ask the client to write out what their agenda is," Colonna said. "I might have a question that goes something like, 'A year from now, I want you to imagine that the coaching was incredibly successful and that you're really happy with it. What would you have accomplished? How would you feel? What would be different?'"

He then has his clients break down their goals into three levels of agendas, to discover what is really driving them. Because that can get quite complex, he gave us a simple, everyday example to show us how the exercise works.

Let's say you are frustrated with your job, and feel like you are not fulfilling your potential. No other opportunity is coming your way, and you feel stuck. You break down your feelings.

• Presenting agenda: What are you telling yourself on the surface? "I need a new job."
• Secondary agenda: You haven't looked for new opportunities either within or outside of your current role. What are you telling yourself a layer below the surface? "I lack the confidence needed to get a new job."
• Tertiary agenda: So you haven't looked elsewhere because you're not confident. Why are you afraid of putting yourself out there? "I'm not worthy of a better job."

In this scenario, you've realized that you are unhappy, but have been operating with a justification for that unhappiness, which allows you to be passive about your problem. You knew all along that this feeling of unworthiness was there, but the exercise brought it to light in a way that it could then be addressed. At this point, you could explore that feeling and determine whether it was based solely on self-deception about personal worth, or if it was rooted in actual poor performance that has come from a lack of effort or inspiration. Either way, you're now able to make changes.

So, whether or not you're an executive, and whether or not you want a coach who can facilitate a thorough, personalized analysis of your behavior, try the agenda exercise. Because after all, if you don't know what your real problem is, you can't solve it.

SEE ALSO: A Silicon Valley CEO coach who's worked with Twilio and Etsy says that successful leadership begins with asking yourself fundamental questions — not mimicking Jeff Bezos

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• "Undercover Billionaire" is a new TV show that premieres August 6 at 10 p.m. on Discovery, in which the entrepreneur Glenn Stearns tries to create a million-dollar company in 90 days.
• The twist is that Stearns, who made his fortune in the mortgage-lending business, will have to build the new business in Erie, Pennsylvania, with only $100, a cell phone, and an old pickup truck, and without his previous contacts.
• In an interview with Business Insider, Stearns explained how his cancer diagnosis and recovery led to the idea for the show, and broke down some early lessons he learned in Erie about starting a business today.

When entrepreneur Glenn Stearns was hit with cancer five years ago, he thought about what made him feel most alive.

Stearns, who had made a fortune in the mortgage-lending business, had a lot of creature comforts to choose from, including his 190-foot yacht and flights on private planes. But none of that came to mind.

"I'd never felt more alive than when I was going for it, swinging for the fences," he told Business Insider in a recent interview. That time was early in Stearns' career, when he had nothing.

And an idea got stuck in his head: What if he tried to do it all over again? Could he build a business from scratch and recreate his self-made origin story?

"I wanted to challenge myself and see if it's possible to really make it again, or was it luck," he said. He also wanted to show his kids, who had seen him very sick as he was recovering from the cancer ("It's gone now," he added), that it's never too late to take a chance.

Stearns also had a bit of a taste for the TV spotlight that he last explored in the 2004 reality show, "The Real Gilligan's Island," a "Survivor"-like show in which the contestants acted like characters from the iconic 1960s sitcom. (Stearns played "the millionaire" and won the show.)

The end result of Stearns' drive to recreate his origin story premieres Tuesday, August 6, at 10 p.m. on Discovery, in the form of a new TV show called "Undercover Billionaire."

'The American Dream'

For "Undercover Billionaire," Discovery sent Stearns to Erie, Pennsylvania, to see if he could create a million-dollar business in 90 days, starting with only $100, a cell phone, and an old pickup truck. He wasn't allowed to use any previous contacts.

In meeting Erie locals, Stearns assumed the alias of "Glenn Bryant," a "regular guy" who had always dreamed of starting a business, and was participating in a new TV show called "The American Dream."

"I said I'd had cancer," he said, and that he was thinking that "life is short and I don't want to have my last breath and have regrets [about wanting] to see if I could build a business." That was all true. In fact, filming on the show had to be delayed because of a recurrence of his cancer, Stearns said.

"What I left out to people was that I had already built a business," he said.

From surviving to thriving

Before Stearns started the show, he'd assumed he would succeed. But those first few days in Erie shook his confidence, he said.

"That's a great lesson I learned," he said. "It's very hard when you don't have enough money to even get by … Getting past the step of surviving and getting into a period of thriving was difficult." He had to go through two stages: First getting shelter, food, and gas, and then actually building a business.

In the pilot episode, we see Stearns sleeping in his truck during winter in Erie, a balance of "coldness versus gas consumption," he said.

But, as predicted, starting from the ground up invigorated him, he said.

He spoke to over 100 people in that first week, trying to figure out what made the city of Erie tick, without any valuable business connections or toys to offer people.

"I was sitting here as Glenn this regular guy [who] didn't have the gravitas," he said. "People were so genuine, wonderful."

He talked to them about their personal lives, the story of Erie, and its young entrepreneurs. He found people who could help him get his nascent business ideas off the ground.

'Put your money where your mouth is'

During the show's run, we'll see whether Stearns succeeded or failed in his goal, but no matter the outcome, he said Discovery wanted him to "put your money where your mouth is."

To that end, after the 90 days, an independent financial evaluator will assess the value of the new company to see if it hit the $1 million mark, Discovery said in a press release. If it does, the top-performing team members will earn a stake in the company and a key role in running it.

But, the company added: "If it's a penny short of $1 million, Glenn will put $1 million of his own money into the business."

And Stearns will go back to Orange County, his family, and his toys.

Back in the game

In our interview in a cafe in New York City, Stearns wouldn't give any hint about the outcome of the show, but his smiles — from someone who dubbed his reputation "worth more than anything in the world" — suggested he was able to build something during his time in Erie.

Now Stearns said he's ready to "take a run at the mortgage banking business again."

His previous foray into the space, Stearns Lending, made over $500 million in revenue in 2014 and 1,700 employees before Blackstone acquired a 70% stake in it in 2015 (the deal terms were not publicly disclosed).

"I'm right in the middle of trying to figure out which way to go on that," he said. "I'll leave it at that."

"Undercover Billionaire" airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on Discovery.

SEE ALSO: Rap star A$AP Ferg describes becoming an entrepreneur in junior high school, learning from his dad, and the 4 things he put on his first business cards

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• Adrian Shepherd is a British productivity consultant who's lived and worked in Japan for the past 24 years.
• We're often our own worst enemies when it comes to productivity, he says. 
• When you say you'll do it later, or you work better at night, you're lying to yourself. Instead, tackle those things now. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

I started out my career as a teacher in Japan. Then I became an entrepreneur. Today, I'm a productivity consultant.

Over the past 30 years, I've worked with CEOs, executives, doctors, teachers, athletes, kids, and even a Supreme Court judge. Having worked with such an array of people in different walks of life was a real eye-opener. What I learned is that we have a lot more in common that we realize.

When it comes to productivity, too often we're our own worst enemies. We love to tell ourselves lies that hold us back from achieving our true potential.

The following are the ten most common I've been told over and over again.

SEE ALSO: Spending 15 to 20 minutes a day intensely worrying can lower your overall stress and bring you peace. This is how to do it right.

1. I’ll do it later

Sure, sure. I've been guilty of this one, just ask my wife. I'm sure many of you can relate. If we can do it now, then do it. It's essentially the concept of Brian Tracy's bestselling book, "Eat That Frog" which talks about tackling the thing you like least, first. Don't put off what you can do now.

2. I work better at night

Nice try. The truth is most of us aren't as effective at night. The daily grind takes a mental toll on all of us. When we head home for the day, all most of us want to do is put our feet up in front of the TV and enjoy our favorite show. Work? Forget it. And word to the wise, night time is when we're most susceptible to persuasion, so be careful.

3. That doesn’t matter

It all matters. Never overlook the small things. Every big thing is simply made up of lots of little things. In James Clear's bestselling book, "Atomic Habits," he talks about managing the little things; the big things take care of themselves. 

4. It doesn’t work

I once heard someone say that the average amount of times people try something is 0.6 times. In other words, most people talk themselves out of even trying it. They believe it won't work for them, so why even bother. Not everything successful people share will work for us. That being said, experience has shown a good deal of them will.

5. I only need five hours sleep

For now, maybe. But the human body needs rest. Navy Seals and unique individuals may be able to perform at peak levels despite only sleeping five hours. Chances are likely that's not us. To operate at peak levels, the human body requires seven to eight hours of rest each night.

6. I’ll skip today and double it up tomorrow

Sounds good, but deep down, most of us know that we really have no intention of actually doing that. We just want an excuse not to do it. 

7. I don’t like to be tied down

Those who don't work from a calendar tend to say that it stresses them out. The problem is that not working from a schedule is recipe for disaster, especially in our age of information overload. Use a calendar.

8. I worked hard so I did a good job

Good results usually come from hard work, but the two are part and parcel. A lot of people believe that they worked hard, therefore they deserve to be paid for their work. Unfortunately, companies aren't really paying you for the work you do, but the results you bring. It's possible for two people to work the same amount of time and end up with completely different results. Work hard, yes indeed. But remember, it's the results, not the time, that really counts.

9. I’m good at multitasking

Wrong! Multitasking is merely jumping from one task to another without actually focusing in on any of them. Thinking and analyzing something takes thought. The bigger the problem or issue, the more thinking and focus it needs. Darren Hardy, one of the top productivity experts in the world, lives by what something he calls "a jam session." Ninety minutes devoted to one single topic. That single-minded focus is something the most successful people all have in common.

10. Perfection is the goal

We should all aim for perfection. However, the goal is not perfection. Apple products are considered some of the best around, but even they are constantly updating things. The goal should always be good enough. You can't bat 1.00. In fact, a mere 0.3 batting average for a professional baseball player will earn him millions of dollars. In business, we must learn to delegate, even if the finished product isn't quite what we want. If it's 80% as good, that's good enough.

• Business Insider has selected the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.
• The list includes scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs fighting to make US healthcare better for everyone.
• Among the honorees are a physicist tackling cancer, a lawyer who guides startups, and a pharmacist changing how patients are cared for.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Healthcare in the US costs more than anywhere else in the world.

For our money, we do get cutting-edge drugs and medical tech. But Americans still die younger than people in other wealthy countries, and healthcare remains out of reach for many.

Meet the people fighting to make the $3.5 trillion US healthcare system better for everyone. They're looking to big data to fight diseases, bringing care to more people in innovative ways, and using new technologies to develop cures.

For that work, they've been named to Business Insider's list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.

As we selected the list, we were looking for doctors, scientists, executives, and entrepreneurs who are dedicating themselves to improving the way we take care of patients and keeping people healthy.

The 30 people below were selected from hundreds of nominations, based on their potential to improve healthcare. The list is arranged alphabetically.

Read on to meet the top young leaders transforming the future of healthcare.

Blythe Adamson, 34, is using data from cancer-technology company Flatiron to do health research 50 times as fast.

Blythe Adamson moved her family from Seattle to New York for the information that health-tech company Flatiron Health has.

"I dragged my kids across the country so I could get access to this data," Adamson, now a senior quantitative scientist at Flatiron, said.

In her role, Adamson works with universities to mine Flatiron's data, using it to advance projects with researchers. Adamson started her career as a researcher, first in HIV-vaccine development and later in health economics, most recently at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

What excited her was the potential of the information Flatiron had on hand. For instance, Adamson was the lead author on a study that explored how the Affordable Care Act affected access to cancer care, finding that in states that broadened access to Medicaid, the disparity between white and black cancer patients was virtually erased. Adamson started the work as part of a Flatiron hackathon.

The idea came from attending a conference in 2018 and seeing work evaluating the effects of the ACA. Adamson noticed that most researchers had access to data only from 2014, too soon after the law went into effect for any clear signals. In contrast, she used data from as recently as this February for the study presented in June.

"What used to take me two to three years now takes two to three weeks," Adamson said.

—Lydia Ramsey

Gil Addo, 33, and Carlos Reines, 34, want to make it easier for everyone to get healthcare.

Gil Addo and Carlos Reines founded RubiconMD in 2013 to make it easier for people to get expert advice on their healthcare from medical specialists.

With the US facing a shortage of doctors as the population ages, it's critical to find new ways of spreading medical expertise. The founders say the platform can be helpful in rural areas where there aren't many doctors, and for low-income people too.

RubiconMD lets an individual's primary-care doctor consult with specialists for help treating complicated or unusual conditions (say an endocrinologist for diabetes or a cardiologist for heart trouble). In many cases, it can replace costly visits and save people months of waiting to get an appointment.

About half the business is linked to the Medicaid health program for people with low incomes, and RubiconMD is catching on in health plans that serve the elderly as well. Typically, health insurers or health systems purchase a subscription to RubiconMD; the service isn't designed for individuals.

RubiconMD has published some data showing that its service can help people avoid specialist visits and help doctors take better care of patients. A more limited analysis suggests it can save money.

The platform is available in 36 states, and Reines and Addo say they plan to keep growing. They're even getting inquiries from other countries, they said.

—Zachary Tracer

Iyah Romm, 35, and Toyin Ajayi, 38, are using teamwork to take care of patients.

Iyah Romm and Toyin Ajayi tried to change the healthcare system from within, before realizing they could have a greater influence from without.

So two years ago, after long stints at established health plans and state health departments, the pair started Cityblock Health, a spinout from Google parent company Alphabet. Their vision is a model of care that emphasizes preventive health and seeks to treat people in need with respect, recognition, and empathy.

"We think there's an imperative to deliver a modern experience of healthcare that delivers to underserved populations," Ajayi told Business Insider. "And there's a business case there as well."

With Cityblock, there's no single physician calling the shots for a patient. Instead, the company uses a team-based approach to healthcare that unites primary-care providers, specialists, and social workers.

The teams meet patients in their communities and come up with personalized plans to get their health on track. Rather than focusing exclusively on later-stage treatments like medications, the teams also consider preventive variables like patients' diets and sources of emotional support.

Romm and Ajayi's goal? "Totally changing the landscape for what healthcare looks like for underserved populations," Romm said.

—Erin Brodwin

Allison Baker, 29, is prescribing food as medicine at Kroger grocery stores and asking health insurers to pay for it.

As a high schooler, Allison Baker's love of food led to hosting dinner parties for friends. After graduating, she decided to pursue a career at a culinary institute that had an emphasis on food innovation.

While studying nutrition, she shifted her focus to the field of dietetics. She started working at hospitals, but then, while earning her master's, she learned about retail nutrition.

Baker is now the director of nutrition at Kroger, where she oversees a team of dieticians and works with Kroger Health president Colleen Lindholz on the health strategy for the biggest grocery chain in the US, including pharmacy, clinics, and nutrition.

When Baker first joined Kroger, her job was to help coordinate the dietitians working across the organization. There are a lot of ways dieticians work across Kroger's 2,800 grocery stores, by providing food samples, teaching healthy recipes, and consulting with patients.

More recently, Baker's been working to find ways to use the expertise of the dieticians. Kroger's goal is to decrease the number of prescriptions dispensed in favor of promoting healthier lifestyles and food choices to grocery and pharmacy customers.

Kroger is also looking to get paid by insurers. Health insurers already pay for dietician services, such as coaching. Baker wants to get them to pay for a "food benefit," in the same way they cover a procedure or a pill. The hope is to have insurers pay for a box of healthy food to be shipped to a member's house.

—Lydia Ramsey

Ambar Bhattacharyya, 36, wants to help more people get affordable care.

Ambar Bhattacharyya might be sick at the sight of blood, but that hasn't stopped the 36-year-old from shaping the way millions of Americans get healthcare.

Bhattacharyya was the eighth employee at MinuteClinic, an urgent-care startup that was acquired by CVS in 2006, and led the chain's national expansion. Now he manages the healthcare investing arm of Maverick Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC that oversees $400 million.

Bhattacharyya spent his childhood helping manage his father's neurology practice, first in rural Virginia, then in rural California. Many of his father's patients had low incomes. Sometimes they paid him in fruit.

So Bhattacharyya knew from the beginning he wanted to help make the system more affordable. He saw people struggling to get care, which led him to believe that healthcare should be more accessible too.

Today, he says the best way to achieve both goals is to think about healthcare from the perspective of the consumer first. For example, MinuteClinic thrived when it extended its hours to be open for working parents at times when traditional doctor's offices were closed.

"It's one of those things where it was, like, grocery stores don't close at 5 p.m.," Bhattacharyya told Business Insider. "Why should healthcare be like this?"

—Erin Brodwin

Daniel Brillman, 35, is bridging the gap between healthcare and social services.

In 2010, Dan Brillman, a US Air Force Reserve pilot, decided to go to Columbia Business School after his first deployment to the Middle East. During his second year, veterans with whom he was deployed called to ask about health and social services. After some inquiries and searching, Brillman found the healthcare system complicated to navigate.

"I became very frustrated because it was so fragmented and I had to sift through the system on behalf of the people I was trying to help," Brillman told Business Insider.

He wrote a paper on his experience, which was noticed by the dean, who connected Brillman with Brad Harrison, the head of Scout Ventures, who encouraged the business idea.

In 2013, Brillman cofounded Unite Us, a platform that helps connect healthcare providers and hospitals to social-service providers like food banks and homeless shelters. The platform tracks the health outcomes of those they serve.

Unite Us works in 55 communities in 23 states. By the end of the year, over 10,000 healthcare, government, and social-service organizations will be included in its networks. The company recently struck a big partnership with CVS Health to aid some of its insurance customers.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Alexandra Broadus, 35, is changing the way Walgreens pharmacists practice in their communities.

Alexandra Broadus, 35, has been working at Walgreens for almost 19 years, starting as a pharmacy technician while still in high school. She'd planned to study journalism in college, but after working in the pharmacy pursued pharmacy school instead.

She started on a local level working to build out programs with health systems and health plans, until a job opened up in Chicago, where Broadus grew up. She was enticed by the promise that she'd get to change the way pharmacy is practiced.

The idea is simple: Pharmacists frequently tend to see patients living with chronic conditions such as diabetes. Right now, pharmacists are paid based on the prescriptions they're dispensed. But if you could pay the pharmacists to intervene, it could help keep patients healthier. Broadus is working toward that for Walgreens' 9,560 pharmacies.

"My goal is, how do I give our pharmacists the tools and resources that they need to practice at the top of their license and do so easily in a way that patients can quickly get the care that they need when they're coming to visit the pharmacy," Broadus said.

For instance, say a pharmacist notices that a patient with diabetes isn't taking a cholesterol drug but should. If the pharmacist suggests that change and the doctor agrees, can the pharmacist get paid by a health plan for that work? That's a big area she's been working on in her first 10 months on the job.

—Lydia Ramsey

For Emily Drabant Conley, 37, changing the healthcare system through genetics is a personal mission

A passion for genetics seized Emily Drabant Conley during her first job out of college. Working at the National Institutes of Health, which she describes as "Disneyland for research," Conley, who studied psychology and business in college, became fascinated by the role genetics might play in people's brains and diseases such as anxiety and depression.

Conley went on to get a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford before venturing into the business world, snagging a job at a new startup with 30 employees called 23andMe. 

"The cool thing about a company that small is you kind of get to do anything," she said.

Conley had been hired to run research, and it was through vetting external research inquiries that she got involved in 23andMe's business development.

The role was a perfect fit for Conley, who had always been interested in business, science, and people. She worked to ink partnerships with drug companies like Genentech, Pfizer, and, last year, GlaxoSmithKline, while helping fundraise, including a $250 million round for 23andMe in 2017.

The partnerships give drug companies access to 23andMe data to find new targets for their drugs. "I felt like this was exactly what I was meant to do," said Conley, who's now 23andMe's vice president of business development.

—Emma Court

Paul Coyne, 33, is using his experience as a patient and provider to change healthcare for the better.

A heart condition from childhood meant that Paul Coyne got more exposure to the healthcare system at a young age than most. Then, at 22, on the weekend before he graduated from college, Coyne had a stroke.

The experience took years to recover from and would spur Coyne to go back to school, earning a number of degrees, including in nursing and business. To change the healthcare industry, stepping outside of the "little boxes" that it puts people into is crucial, he said.

Today, the 33-year-old's career spans healthcare, business, and technology. He's a nurse practitioner who leads a team of 60 at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, while overseeing the hospital's data-science efforts around nursing.

Coyne also cofounded and serves as president of health-tech startup Inspiren, which puts medical practitioners and technologists into the same room to "meet the true clinical needs of the everyday provider."

Ultimately, Coyne says his career and motivations in healthcare go back to his experiences being sick and living with a chronic disease.

"Walking around the hospital, I always picture myself in the bed," he says. "Most technology I've invented is always from the perspective of me as a patient."

—Emma Court

Joshua DeFonzo, 39, is overseeing strategy at J&J’s $3.4 billion surgical-robot startup.

Joshua DeFonzo said he got lucky with his first job in healthcare. Straight out of college, he took a job as a sales representative for the medical-device company Medtronic, which launched him into the medical-technology industry. "I realize now I was very fortunate to get that job," DeFonzo said.

Since then DeFonzo's worked for companies like NuVasive, Confluent Surgical, and NeuroLogica, commercializing the companies' technologies. In 2015, he became chief commercial officer for CareDx, a company that uses genomics and other technologies to help organ-transplant patients.

That same year he was hired as an independent contractor at Auris Health, a health-tech company that makes a controller-operated robotic camera, helping doctors see inside the body. The hope is to use the device to do surgery, too. He became vice president of clinical innovation in 2016 and then chief strategy officer in 2018.

DeFonzo said he was drawn to Auris because of the potential of the company's technology. "It's the future of healthcare," DeFonzo said.

In April, Auris was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $3.4 billion. Once the deal closed, DeFonzo was made chief operating officer, overseeing Auris' integration with the giant healthcare company.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Sean Duffy, 35, is providing care digitally for diabetes and depression.

Sean Duffy is the cofounder and CEO of Omada Health, a startup that lets people access healthcare virtually. Designed for people with diabetes and other obesity-related conditions, Omada recently began expanding to help treat mental-health conditions too.

The son of an engineer and a nurse, Duffy, who is 35, planned to work in either tech or medicine. But the decision was made for him, he says.

While pursuing a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard, Duffy got the chance to team up with Adrian James, Omada's cofounder and, at the time, the medical-products lead at a startup called Ideo. Together, the pair got to work on a startup designed to bridge tech and healthcare.

Eventually, that company became Omada. Duffy never looked back. "I started waking up imagining a world where something like Omada existed," Duffy told Business Insider. "It was obligatory, in my view, to run with it."

Duffy sees Omada becoming what he calls "the healthcare provider of tomorrow," where the majority of care is delivered remotely through a combination of video, text, and peer support. That flips the current model — where the first line of treatment usually involves a trip to the doctor — on its head. "I believe about 80% of care can be done digitally," Duffy added.

—Erin Brodwin

Chris Esguerra, 39, is redefining what healthcare means to get patients care for conditions that have been overlooked for too long.

Chris Esguerra learned the power of a supportive community at age 7. He and his family were newly arrived immigrants in California, but "it didn't feel like it was hard because we were always part of a community, always embraced," he said.

Esguerra, 39, brings that experience and his background as a psychiatrist to his role as senior medical director of Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, where his team focuses on members covered by the government programs Medicare and Medicaid.

Because those individuals often have health conditions and need different kinds of social support, Esguerra sees his job as redrawing the lines of traditional healthcare, so it encompasses things like helping people who struggle to get reliable access to food.

That includes treating patients for diabetes alongside food insecurity, by creating a "social needs care specialist" that doctors at his health plan's two primary care clinics could refer their patients to when they didn't have enough to eat.

"We're redefining what health really means, and in that we're saying that health isn't always about when you're sick, health is about all of the other aspects in your life that affect you," like food insecurity and healthcare disparities, he says.

Esguerra says it's the right thing to do, but he also makes a business case for it. Creating the "social needs care specialist" saved Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan $4 million in hospitalizations last year alone.

—Emma Court

Mariya Filipova, 35, is using her firsthand experience with healthcare to better shape where it’s heading.

Mariya Filipova began her career in finance, working at Barclays in London through the financial crisis.

The crisis taught her how to navigate complex situations when things go wrong. And it showed her the importance of leaders who could evaluate a situation from different perspectives.

Healthcare, from where she sits, is a heavily regulated industry that's headed for a massive transition as well, and stands to benefit from leaders with those skills, she said.

"I personally am on a mission to help leaders and people who have been in healthcare for decades, doing things in the business-as-usual mindset, see things that could be done differently," Filipova said.

About 18 months ago, Filipova's life took an unexpected turn when she was diagnosed with a kidney tumor. "I learned more about healthcare in my experience in 18 months as a patient than my entire decade as an adviser," Filipova said.

When Filipova was ready to go back to work, she made the move over to Anthem, where she joined as the vice president of innovation. She made the decision in part because Gail Boudreaux had recently stepped in as CEO and was building a digital strategy.

On the innovation team, she helps look for new investments. Her team also helps other parts of the organization with digital projects, such as predicting if a member might call about a problem and proactively reaching out instead. They also collaborate with other organizations to pin down how the healthcare industry can use new technologies like blockchain.

—Lydia Ramsey

Hadiyah-Nicole Green, 38, is using physics to fight cancer and create an alternative to chemotherapy.

Hadiyah-Nicole Green, a physicist whose research focuses on fighting cancer, says she got interested in combating the disease because of her personal experience.

The day after Green graduated from Alabama A&M University, her aunt who raised her told her she had cancer and that she didn't want to undergo treatment.

"She chose to die, rather than experience the side effects of chemotherapy," Green told Business Insider.

Three months after her aunt passed away, her uncle was diagnosed with cancer. As he was treated, Green saw her uncle experience the side effects of chemotherapy. Seeing her aunt and uncle struggle with cancer became a turning point.

"I wanted to change the way we treat cancer, and that became my mission in life," she said.

After finishing her doctorate in physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2016, she founded the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation, named after her aunt.

Green is now an assistant professor at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She's working on a cancer treatment that uses lasers and nanotechnology to fight the disease. So far, it's been tested only in mice, but the early results are promising, Green said. She plans to use funds raised by the foundation to get the treatment into trials in people.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Kristen Park Hopson, 39, is building personalized treatments that could revolutionize medicines for cancer and other diseases.

When Kristen Park Hopson graduated from college, she was just starting to realize a growing interest in science research. So she did what a lot of people do but don't always admit: Hopson "shamelessly" moved back into her parents' basement in Vermont to work as a research associate at University of Vermont's medical school.

Today Hopson, who holds a doctorate in molecular medicine from Boston University School of Medicine, directs key cancer research at the fast-growing buzzy biotech Moderna.

The 39-year-old leads research projects, including on the company's signature personalized cancer vaccines, which are custom-built for each patient in an effort to fight off the disease better. Its two furthest-along cancer vaccine products are in relatively early on in development, or early and mid-stage trials, respectively.

The work "is really transforming not only the way you think about treating a patient but also the way you think about making medicines," she says. "The possibilities could be endless."

—EmmaCourt

Shrenik Jain, 23, and Ravi Shah, 28, created a social network to help people with addiction.

Shrenik Jain and Ravi Shah are tackling one of the most neglected areas of healthcare: substance use. Their platform, called Marigold Health, is designed to help people with addiction recover by connecting them to a network of peers.

Jain, 23, got the idea for Marigold after spending two years working as a Baltimore EMT and regularly reviving people who'd overdosed on opioids. His cofounder, Shah, 27, watched a close friend who had depression. Both quickly realized that the people they were trying to help lacked the social support needed to stabilize them. "For interventions to work, you need very continuous care," Jain told Business Insider.

So to provide that kind of regular support, Jain and his cofounder, Shah, created a text-based platform that allows people with addiction to tap into a social network tailored to their needs. The goal is to engage people and give them tools to motivate one another.

Marigold recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from the influential Silicon Valley health venture fund Rock Health. Other backers include Rough Draft Ventures of General Catalyst, the Cambridge-based VC that's funded successful startups like Jet, Snap Inc., and Kayak, as well as the tech venture arm of Johns Hopkins University.

—Erin Brodwin

Christos Kyratsous, 38, is figuring out how to tackle infectious diseases while also putting microbes to use in tough-to-treat conditions

Christos Kyrastous studied pharmacy before heading to New York to study microbiology at Columbia. He joined the Tarrytown, New York, drugmaker Regenron after working as a researcher at New York University.

"I always liked basic biology, but I always had this idea of applying the knowledge that we get from human biology to help human health," Kyratsous said.  Eight years in, he's now the vice president of research for infectious diseases and viral vector technologies, a job that has two parts.

First, he oversees the development of drugs to treat diseases such as Ebola. He's also helping develop new technologies for treatments like gene therapy, in which a virus delivers information to help the body produce something it wasn't making otherwise.

To start, Regeneron is working with companies like gene-editing biotech Intellia Therapeutics and hearing-loss biotech Decibel Therapeutics to develop treatments as well as working with companies trying to infect cancer tumors with viruses that fight cancer, known as oncolytic viruses.

—Lydia Ramsey

Kimber Lockhart, 33, is building a healthcare guide for every patient.

As the chief technology officer of primary-care operator One Medical, Kimber Lockhart is working on a suite of tools designed to improve the patient experience, from the time someone reaches out about a health symptom to the time they check out of the doctor's office.

Today, there's an unfair burden on patients to be their own health experts and advocates, Lockhart says. That means that patients can end up talking to the wrong type of clinician or wasting time or money on unnecessary visits or treatments. Lockhart, 32, aims for One Medical to solve that problem by providing the support that patients need.

"Oftentimes we leave patients to fend for themselves, whether it's deciding to get primary care or virtual care or specialty care," Lockhart told Business Insider.

"Wouldn't it be great if everyone had a guide to be able to say, 'Hey, is this the kind of thing I can video-chat with someone about? Or should I come in and see someone? Or do I need a specialist?'"

She sees One Medical's app and much of its software as that guide.

"We do as much as we can to shoulder the burden with patients," Lockhart said.

—Erin Brodwin

Aziz Nazha, 35, is using AI to move healthcare into the 21st century and take better care of patients.

Aziz Nazha always loved computers. But when he took a national exam for universities in Syria, where he grew up, Nazha qualified for the most competitive option instead: medical school.

After medical school, Nazha came to the US to do research and his residency. Today, the 35-year-old physician melds the two interests as director of the Cleveland Clinic Center of Clinical Artificial Intelligence, where he hopes to use the technology to change how doctors think about medicine.

"Computer scientists and statisticians don't speak physicians' languages and vice versa," Nazha told Business Insider, a gap that he also sees as an opportunity to bridge. "It's very hard, by the way. You go and get a lot of resistance from old guys who don't get this technology."

Even creating the center, announced in March, wasn't easy. It took about a year of convincing the institution. Nazha has also worked to create a new coding course for Cleveland Clinic's medical school, something intended to be a model for medical schools struggling to add AI to their curriculums.

As a physician, Nazha has been frustrated by the trial-and-error process to treating cancer with chemotherapy, since there's no way to know which patients will respond best to which treatment option. AI technology could start changing that, he said.

"I always tell people that AI is a tool, and what I use it for is to solve a problem," Nazha said.

—Emma Court

Vinay Prasad, 36, is the Twitter firebrand pushing back on Big Pharma and standing up for patients.

Vinay Prasad is speaking and tweeting truth to power. The 36-year-old hematologist-oncologist, cancer researcher, and associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University wants more of the treatments that doctors offer to help patients in the ways they care about.

A big part of that means combating the hype around new cancer drugs, which are often praised as game changers but are instead typically "marginal at best" in terms of benefit to patients, he said. And Prasad isn't afraid to make a few enemies.

The oncologist says drugs need to be evaluated from the frame of what they do for patients, something a shift to new kinds of research measurements intended to expedite drug development has neglected.

For everything from how cancer drugs are approved to the way treatments are priced, "a misconception is that we are doing the best job we can," he says. "There's tremendous room for improvement."

—Emma Court

Angela Profeta, 37, is working to change how we think about urgent care.

Early in Angela Profeta's career, she worked at nonprofit in Nicaragua, where she saw firsthand what happens when people don't get adequate healthcare. Upon her return to New York, she pursued a master's in health policy, and she's just finished working on her doctorate in health policy and economics at New York University. She decided to focus on the issue of healthcare access in the US, rather than internationally.

"Healthcare access is an issue everywhere, and its connection to poverty in connection to the financial lives of people is a problem everywhere," Profeta said.

At the same time, Profeta worked as a consultant, working with healthcare companies including urgent-care firm CityMD. At the time it had only a few locations. What drew her to CityMD was that it was helping New Yorkers get healthcare.

At CityMD she's the chief strategy officer, a role that entails working with health plans and providers, getting them to work with the urgent care operator in ways they haven't in the past. For instance, she's worked with health systems to keep some of CityMD's centers open later, taking the burden off nearby emergency rooms.

CityMD recently announced that it's combining with Summit Medical Group, a New Jersey doctor group. Profeta plans to be the chief strategy officer of the combined company.

—Lydia Ramsey

Andrew Schutzbank, 37, is improving patient care with new medical record technologies.

In the second year of his internal-medicine training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Andrew Schutzbank met Rushika Fernandopulle, the CEO of Iora Health. Initially scheduled as a 10-minute meeting, the two talked for an hour and a half about a new way of providing primary care.

After finishing his residency, Schutzbank was hired by Fernandopulle to be an assistant medical director. Now Schutzbank has a bigger role at Iora, overseeing growth, managing teams across eight states and implementing new technologies to deliver better patient care.

"Our goal is to take excellent care of patients and change healthcare while doing it," Schutzbank told Business Insider.

Iora is a primary-care practice trying to improve healthcare by offering longer doctor's visits, follow-up calls, and more hands-on care. Iora works with "sponsors," mainly employers or Medicare Advantage health plans for the elderly, to cover the cost.

To aid Iora's mission, Schutzbank has overseen the integration of Chirp, the organization's own electronic health-record system. The system is designed to accomplish everything necessary for individual patients within one workflow so that physicians and care teams have better quality time with their patients.

"In medicine, it's been transaction style over relationships," Schutzbank said. "For 10 years we've tried to make a business model to put patients' needs first and minimize transactions."

—Clarrie Feinstein

Emily Silgard, 36, is using data science to improve cancer treatment.

Every day Emily Silgard, a data-science manager and team lead at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, walks by the wards of the patients she's trying to help. Silgard is using advanced techniques to help doctors and researchers at Fred Hutch come up with new approaches to treating cancer.

"Research studies take years and years to complete, so it feels very hopeless when an illness can only take months to progress," Silgard told Business Insider. "There's a very real reminder every day that we need to move much, much faster."

Having worked the past seven years at Fred Hutch in Seattle, Silgard has made strides in the data-science field. She uses natural-language processing (computers dealing with human language) to advance oncology research by accessing clinical data from medical records more quickly.

Silgard and her team also collaborated with faculty to develop predictive models to assist in preventive care. And she was the lead developer on a project using natural-language processing to search lung cancer patients' records for treatable mutations.

"We're using machine learning and automation to help speed up the loop between bench and bedside," Silgard said, "to help ascertain how we can improve patients' quality of life, and generally how we can enable our researchers to find cures."

—Clarrie Feinstein

Ariane Tschumi, 35, helps healthcare startups stay on the right side of the law.

Healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries in the US. That means it can be easy for disruptive startups to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Ariane Tschumi's job is to keep them out of trouble.

Tschumi is the general counsel at Galileo, a startup that's working to make it easier for people to get access to healthcare. "I don't see myself as a lawyer, as a 'no' person. It's a 'how do we get there' — it's a 'yes and,'" she said. "It is ultimately about calibrating risk for a company."

Tschumi previously worked with startups like Oscar Health and Cityblock Health. She has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and worked on healthcare-innovation policy as a presidential management fellow in the Obama administration.

Tschumi said she got interested in healthcare while working in Aceh, Indonesia, to help people recover from the 2004 tsunami. Ultimately, she decided that to help transform healthcare she needed a better understanding of the laws and regulations that shape it.

"My background as a lawyer comes from an interest in the policy and regulatory world and very much that systems-change perspective," she said. "How do we change the law to promote more innovative healthcare models, and separately, how do we operate within those innovative contexts."

—Zachary Tracer

Sara Vaezy, 36, is mapping out the digital future of the hospital.

Sara Vaezy came to Providence St. Joseph Health by accident. Vaezy, who has a background in healthcare administration and policy, had been working as a hospital consultant.

Along the way she had asked her team to prepare a case study on Providence, the West Coast-based health system that runs 51 hospitals and made $24 billion in 2018.

She had learned that Aaron Martin, a former Amazon executive, had joined the organization as its chief digital officer. Martin called her, and their initial conversation lasted two and a half hours. Vaezy, who hadn't spent much time working with folks with technology backgrounds, was surprised by Martin's energy.

"It was unusual in his steadfastness, in 'It's going to be super difficult, we're trying to do 40 years of work within 10 years, and that is very exciting rather than deterring,'" Vaezy recalled of his mindset. In two months, Vaezy had moved to Seattle to join the organization. "I caught the bug," she said.

Three and a half years in, Vaezy is chief digital strategy officer for Providence, working to figure out the strategy that will ideally make care accessible and affordable. For instance, Providence is working on spinning out a same-day-care platform called ExpressCare aimed at helping patients book appointments, as well as formalizing an internal incubator.

—Lydia Ramsey

Sara Wajnberg, 36, is betting a better user experience could improve our relationship with health insurers.

Sara Wajnberg, now the chief product officer at health-insurance startup Oscar Health, joined the company in its early days six years ago.

Wajnberg had a background working in product but hadn't worked in healthcare. Her sister was leading the product team at another company backed by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and introduced her to the team. "I was pretty much sold immediately," Wajnberg said.

Wajnberg oversees the technology Oscar uses from the app that members use to the technology the company uses to process insurance claims. Oscar offers health-insurance plans on the individual exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act, plans to small businesses, and, in 2020, Medicare Advantage plans.

Along the way, she and the team realized that there would be a lot they'd have to build themselves, rather than relying on other software services to do it for them. She also helped oversee the development of Oscar's concierge service, which connects members to a team of healthcare professionals that help members navigate benefits and questions about their health.

—Lydia Ramsey

Ben Wanamaker, 37, finds ways to make Aetna members healthier with the help of technology.

Starting out, Ben Wanamaker hadn't expected to get into healthcare. He had a background in finance and worked in consulting before joining a medical-device company. Then he went to work with a Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen, at his think tank, which got him thinking about the roles consumers and corporations play in healthcare.

The way he saw it, "They don't need to be at odds," Wanamaker said. His work led him to Walmart, working on its Care Clinics, where customers could get primary-care services. Wanamaker then headed to one of the largest health insurers in the US, Aetna, where he's now the head of consumer technology and services. (Aetna in 2018 was acquired by CVS Health.)

Wanamaker's job is to figure out how to get Aetna members healthier with the help of programs like one the insurer has with Apple called Attain. The program is a bet that an app and a smartwatch can make you healthier. Two months in, Wanamaker said, people are using the Attain program at a higher rate than he had expected, though it's still too early to get results.

—Lydia Ramsey

Kaja Wasik, 35, is studying the complex interplay between medications and our DNA.

Kaja Wasik has been defying institutional barriers since she was a teenager. Born and raised in Poland, Wasik didn't have regular access to a computer until she moved to the US at age 25. Today, as cofounder and chief science officer of a startup called Variant Bio, Wasik, now 35, is working to develop drugs by studying people with diverse genomes.

The idea came to Wasik after she noticed that people in dozens of countries in the Pacific Islands and Africa were being largely left out of genetics research. "If you don't have European ancestry," Wasik told Business Insider, "you just can't get the same quality of health information." That's particularly relevant when it comes to drugs. White Europeans make up roughly 78% of genetic databases. Wasik hopes to change that.

In the next decade, she hopes to create a pipeline of new drugs based on this research in genetically underrepresented populations and also in populations with unusual medically relevant traits. While the work will focus on underrepresented groups, it'll have benefits for everyone as we learn more about the complex interplay between medications and our DNA.

"These discoveries won't be applicable only to those diverse individuals but to everyone," she said.

—Erin Brodwin

Jonathon Whitton, 36, is working to halt hearing loss with gene therapy.

Jonathon Whitton saw firsthand how his grandfather withdrew from the family as his hearing deteriorated. "Within our family, I watched him disconnect," Whitton said.

For Whitton, the ability to communicate is a profound means for people to connect. This belief led him to train to be an audiologist at the University of Louisville and to work as a pediatric audiologist. In 2010, he started his doctorate in the health, science, and technology program at MIT, focusing his research on developing therapeutics for hearing.

As he was finishing the program in 2016, Whitton was approached by Decibel Therapeutics and hired to work on therapies for hearing loss. "It was the right time and the right place, with people from the inner-ear biology world and the drug development world coming together," he said.

Before becoming the director of clinical development last year, he was the associate director of drug discovery. At Decibel, Whitton has worked on developing drugs and on clinical trials for the company's hearing treatments.

Two treatments he's working on are being tested in early-stage trials in people. One is designed to protect hearing in people receiving cancer treatments that can harm their ears. Another is a drug to prevent people's hearing from being harmed by certain antibiotics.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Gerren Wilson, 38, is fighting to bring communities of color into pharmaceutical company research and ensure that drugs of the future are inclusive.

Gerren Wilson became interested in a career in healthcare early on. While growing up in a big family in St. Louis, Missouri, Wilson would hear relatives talk about their health issues and medicines they were taking. In college at Morehouse, in Atlanta, Wilson observed that "even within black men there was a lot of diversity in backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs."

The 38-year-old brings those experiences to bear at the pharmaceutical company Genentech, which is owned by the Swiss drug giant Roche, where he works to get more diverse groups of patients involved in the company's research for new drugs, keeping in mind the many ways that the healthcare system has historically wronged people of color.

Wilson's work spans Genentech's own research, collaborations with physicians and healthcare groups, patient communities, and government representatives, all in the aim of advancing more inclusive research. The work is important because drugs have historically been tested mostly in white men, and therapies don't work the same across different people.

"Healthcare is an industry where, in order to be a part of this, you empathize with helping others," he says. "That's central to what you want to accomplish."

—Emma Court

• The Princeton Review, a college-admissions company, found the schools where marijuana use is most common.
• In a survey of 140,000 students, most colleges that made the list were located in states where cannabis is legal, like Vermont, California, and Colorado.
• The No. 1 school for weed smokers is the University of Vermont, in Burlington.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For many, toking up has been as integral a part of the college experience as ultimate Frisbee and late-night study sessions. And while the activity has often been shrouded in secrecy, the mainstreaming of marijuana now has college students openly discussing their smoking habits.

Enter the Princeton Review's 2020 edition of "The Best 385 Colleges," which includes among its 62 rankings a list on campus cannabis use cheekily labeled "Reefer Madness."

To find out which colleges are out-smoking the rest, the Princeton Review surveyed 140,000 students in 385 schools, asking them, "How widely is marijuana used at your school?" Not surprisingly, many of the colleges with students reporting highest marijuana use are in states where recreational use of the drug is legal.

According to a 2017 Monitoring the Future study from the University of Michigan, 38% of college students aged 19 to 22 have reported smoking weed in the past year.

And as a sign of the times, weed isn't just being smoked on campus anymore — it's being taught. Some schools, like Cornell University in New York and Colorado's University of Denver, are offering cannabis courses. The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy will even offer a master's degree in medical cannabis, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Here are the colleges where students report the most recreational use of weed.

SEE ALSO: From a master's in medical cannabis to a minor in weed, these are the college programs growing the next crop of marijuana entrepreneurs

20. Hamilton College — Clinton, New York

Total enrollment:1,915

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

19. Syracuse University — Syracuse, New York

Total enrollment:15,226

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

18. University of Wisconsin-Madison — Madison, Wisconsin

Total enrollment:32,648

Is marijuana legal in Wisconsin? Neither medical nor recreational use is allowed.

17. Ithaca College — Ithaca, New York

Total enrollment:6,101

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

16. University of Colorado, Boulder

Total enrollment:29,091

Is marijuana legal in Colorado?  Colorado legalized the drug for medical and recreational purposes in 2012.

15. Colorado College — Colorado Springs, Colorado

Total enrollment:2,114

Is marijuana legal in Colorado? Colorado legalized the drug for medical and recreational purposes in 2012.

14. Champlain College — Burlington, Vermont

Total enrollment:2,129

Is marijuana legal in Vermont? Both medical and recreational use is legal, but there are no laws for legal production or sale just yet.

13. State University of New York, Purchase College — Purchase, New York

Total enrollment:4,297

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

12. Sarah Lawrence College — Bronxville, New York

Total enrollment:1,410

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

11. Warren Wilson College — Asheville, North Carolina

Total enrollment:657

Is marijuana legal in North Carolina? Neither medical nor recreational use is allowed.

10. University of California, Santa Barbara

Total enrollment:22,186

Is marijuana legal in California? California was the first state to legalize the drug for medical purposes in 1996, and recreational use became legal in 2016.

9. Marlboro College — Marlboro, Vermont

Total enrollment:183

Is marijuana legal in Vermont? Both medical and recreational use is legal, but there are no laws for legal production or sale just yet.

8. Bard College — Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Total enrollment:1,893

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

7. University of Maine — Orono, Maine

Total enrollment:9,365

Is marijuana legal in Maine? Both medical and recreational use are legal.

6. Reed College — Portland, Oregon

Total enrollment:1,483

Is marijuana legal in Oregon? Both medical and recreational use are legal.

5. Skidmore College — Saratoga Springs, New York

Total enrollment:2,612

Is marijuana legal in New York? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

4. Wesleyan University — Middletown, Connecticut

Total enrollment:3,009

Is marijuana legal in Connecticut? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

3. University of Rhode Island — Kingston, Rhode Island

Total enrollment:13,865

Is marijuana legal in Rhode Island? Only medical marijuana is legal, but possessing small quantities has been decriminalized.

2. Pitzer College — Claremont, California

Total enrollment:1,112

Is marijuana legal in California? California was the first state to legalize the drug for medical purposes in 1996, and recreational use became legal in 2016.

1. University of Vermont — Burlington, Vermont

Total enrollment:11,328

Is marijuana legal in Vermont? Both medical and recreational use are legal, but there are no laws for legal production or sale just yet.

• Business Insider has selected the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.
• The list includes scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs fighting to make US healthcare better for everyone. 
• Among the honorees are a physicist tackling cancer, a lawyer who guides startups, and a pharmacist changing how patients are cared for. Click here to see the full list.
• This is a preview of the full list, which is available exclusively to BI Prime subscribers.

Healthcare in the US costs more than anywhere else in the world.

For our money, we do get cutting-edge drugs and medical tech. But Americans still die younger than people in other wealthy countries, and healthcare remains out of reach for many.

Meet the people fighting to make the $3.5 trillion US healthcare system better for everyone. They're looking to big data to fight diseases, bringing care to more people in innovative ways, and using new technologies to develop cures.

For that work, they've been named to Business Insider's list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.

Click here to see the full list of the young leaders who are transforming US healthcare.

As we selected the list, we were looking for doctors, scientists, executives, and entrepreneurs who are dedicating themselves to improving the way we take care of patients and keeping people healthy.

The 30 people below were selected from hundreds of nominations, based on their potential to improve healthcare. The list is arranged alphabetically.

Click here to meet the top young leaders transforming the future of healthcare.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What apple cider vinegar really does to your body, according to a doctor

Hello,

Welcome to a very special edition of Dispensed, Business Insider's weekly healthcare newsletter that typically hits your inbox on Fridays. 

Well, we just couldn't wait. We had to share with you a big project we've been working on all summer.

Without further ado...

Meet the 30 young leaders who are transforming the future of healthcare and disrupting a $3.5 trillion industry

It was great getting to chat with so many leaders in the industry, scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs fighting to make US healthcare better for everyone.

There was a physicist tackling cancer, a lawyer who guides startups, and a pharmacist changing how patients are cared for (among more than two dozen others!). The list is available exclusively to BI Prime subscribers. But if you haven't signed up yet, now would be a good time, and a trial month should be just $1.

Thanks to all who responded to my pleas for nominees, we were overwhelmed by the number of submissions this year! 

Click here to meet the top young leaders transforming the future of healthcare.

Stay tuned for more posts ahead, including book recommendations and career advice. Be on the lookout for those in the next week or two. (I'll of course be sure to recap in our regularly scheduled Friday edition of Dispensed).

Until then, we'd love to hear what y'all think of this year's list! Who do you want to hear more about? Who else should we know about and perhaps consider for next year? You can find us at healthcare@businessinsider.com or reach me directly at lramsey@businessinsider.com.

- Lydia 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to survive an alligator attack

• At 32 years old, Jamie Cohen is not only the youngest person in the C-Suite of ANGI Homeservices, she's also one of the youngest female CFOs in the country.
• Cohen says she's regularly turned to Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" whenever she needed inspiration along the many stages of her career.
• Now, she recommends the novel to friends and colleagues who are struggling professionally.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories. 

Jamie Cohen, one of the youngest female CFOs in the country, left her first college internship with something more than job experience: She left with a book recommendation that would change her life.

Her boss at the time, whom she describes as an "incredible mentor," told her to check out "The Alchemist" by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho. She read it and immediately fell in love with the book's universal message about pursuing one's own path. 

"Following my dreams and trusting my heart provided me with so many professional and personal opportunities," Cohen, who is the CFO of digital-marketplace company ANGI Homeservices, told Business Insider. "It has taught me more than I ever expected."

Many people have "that book" they turn to time and time again for insights. And while some power players might recommend self-help tomes or lofty works of nonfiction (as hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio recently did in an exclusive interview with Business Insider), Cohen's choice stands out for being a novel.

Published in 1988, "The Alchemist" is a simple tale about a young shepherd who has a dream about finding treasure in the pyramids of Egypt. He sells his flock and begins a journey to fulfill that vision. He learns multiple lessons life lessons along the way, with an often quoted one being: "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

"The beauty of this book is that no matter your background or experience, there is something to learn from reading it, and something different may resonate with you depending on your life circumstances," Cohen said.

The CFO says she's frequently turned to the book when making big life choices, such as the time she had to decide whether to take a job in the East Coast or one in Denver right after college. Rereading her favorite novel gave her the perspective to take the plunge and move to Denver, where she joined a tech company that eventually became ANGI Homeservices.

"As chance would have it, Denver became a very important part to both my personal growth and my professional growth," Cohen explained. "I eventually found a job at a small tech company that was trying to change the way people found and hired home pros. Now, that small company has become a much bigger company and my opportunities have grown along with it."

Cohen is not alone in praising the life lessons found in "The Alchemist." Oprah Winfrey writes: "Though he doesn't consider himself a spiritual guide, Paulo Coelho has been one of my great teachers. I still keep 'The Alchemist' beside my bed and am always meeting others who do the same."

When Cohen recently reread the book, she realized that she had identified her own life purpose, and was firmly along the path to fulfilling it. 

Two lessons from the book resonated with her when she read it this time around:

1. How challenges along the path shaped her, and strengthened her personal resiliency (or fortitude).
2. The power of relationships and mentorships she's benefited from along the way, and the influence she has on others.

Cohen has recommended this book to colleagues or friends who are struggling professionally to help them find their long-term purpose.

She recently recommended the book to a newer director at the company.

"She has a lot of opportunity ahead of her," Cohen shared, "but that is often very daunting. I hope this book will provide some balance and inspiration for her as it has done for me."

SEE ALSO: How this 32-year-old became a CFO is a lesson in how mentorship helps break the glass ceiling

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Area 51 became the center of alien conspiracy theories

• A third of all meetings in America are unproductive, according to a 2013 study.
• Unproductive meetings are usually caused by having too many people in the room, not having an agenda, or simply meeting too often.
• Successful executives like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs developed techniques to combat bad meetings — for example, Steve Jobs liked to have meetings with the fewest number of people possible.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Americans sit through some 11 million meetings every day. A third of those meetings are unproductive, costing companies $37 billion a year, according to a 2013 study.

When meetings go horribly wrong, it's usually due to sloppy agendas, un-articulated ground rules, and having too many participants, among other basic structural mistakes. 

Read more:Google asked 5,600 employees about how they work and found that its happiest, most productive teams do 3 things differently

Some of the most effective executives in history — from GM czar Alfred Sloan to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — have personally run the meetings that invariably filled their calendars.

Here are the tips and tricks they've used to make meetings more productive.

SEE ALSO: Why meetings, email, and 'excessive collaboration' are the unholy trinity of burnout

DON'T MISS: Billionaire Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio once received a memo from his employees saying he 'belittled' and 'humiliated' them, and it turned out to be great for everyone

Legendary GM CEO Alfred Sloan said little — then made follow-ups.

Alfred Sloan ran GM from the 1920s to the '50s. During that time he led GM to become the world's largest corporation— in the '50s, GM held 46% of the US auto market and employed over 600,000 Americans. 

Sloan is also credited with inventing modern corporate structure. 

According to leadership guru Peter Drucker, the follow-up memo was one of Sloan's go-to tools. 

After any formal meeting — in which he simply announced the purpose, listened to what people had to say, and then left — Sloan would send a follow-up memo with a plan of action. 

Drucker's take: 

[Sloan] immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who'd been present at the meeting.

These memos made Sloan an "outstandingly effective executive," Drucker argues, and you might say they were a key to GM's dominance of the 20th century.

Former Opsware CEO and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz likes to have one-to-one meetings.

Back when he was a CEO, Ben Horowitz led Opsware to a $1.6 billion sale to HP in 2007.

Two years later, he cofounded Andreessen Horowitz, probably the most sought-after firm in venture capital. 

Horowitz, who spends much of his time mentoring young leaders, says that most important job for a CEO is to architect the way people communicate in a company. 

The one-to-one meeting is essential to that process, he says, as it's the best place for ideas and critiques to flow up from employees to management.

Here's his take on how to run one: 

If you like structured agendas, then the employee should set the agenda. A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance.

This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing. It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs.

During the meeting, since it's the employee's meeting, the manager should do 10% of the talking and 90% of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk demands that people be super prepared.

Musk has incredibly high standards. He has a reputation for firing people if they miss a deadline. So if you're meeting with him at Tesla or SpaceX, you have to be ready.

In an April 2018 company-wide email obtained by Jalopnik, Musk had this to say about meetings:

Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you're certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.

Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

What else would you expect from the most badass CEO in America?

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sticks to a strict agenda.

Sandberg brings a spiral-bound notebook with her to every meeting. In that notebook is a list of discussion points and action items. 

"She crosses them off one by one, and once every item on a page is checked, she rips the page off and moves to the next," Fortune reports. "If every item is done 10 minutes into an hour-long meeting, the meeting is over."

The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs kept meetings as small as possible.

Jobs led Apple to become one of the world's most valuable companies, creating consumer-friendly products with sleek designs. 

He ran meetings with a similar minimalism. He hated when they were too big, because too many minds in a room got in the way of simplicity. 

In one tale, Jobs was in a weekly meeting with Apple's ad agency and spied someone who didn't regularly attend. He asked who she was, listened to her reply, and politely told her to get out: "I don't think we need you in this meeting," he said. "Thanks."

Jobs carried the same standard with himself: When US President Barack Obama asked him to a meeting of tech darlings, he declined. The guest list was too long.

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer aggressively vets every idea.

As we've reported before, Mayer gets to the bottom of any proposal brought her way.

Product managers or designers who would sit down with the former Yahoo exec would have their strategies thoroughly vetted through a series of questions, like: 

• How was that researched?
• What was the research methodology?
• How did you back that up?

These questions are just one aspect of the many strategies Mayer used to shake up Yahoo.

Google cofounder Larry Page says no one should wait for a meeting to make a decision.

Page became CEO of Google in 2011, until Sundar Pichai took over in the role in 2015.

He immediately sent out a company-wide email. The subject: how to run meetings effectively. One of his tips is to designate a decision-maker for every meeting. But even more importantly, Page made the point that you might not need a meeting at all. 

"No decision should ever wait for a meeting," the email reads. "If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately."

Nike CEO Mark Parker doodles through his meetings.

Parker doesn't just manage Nike's $24 billion-a-year athletic empire, he brings his own designs. Parker walks into meetings with a Moleskine notebook under his arm — full of his sketches of new products.

In 2009, cyclist Lance Armstrong was in a business meeting with Parker, who spent the whole time doodling in his notebook. At the end of the meeting, Armstrong asked to seewhat he drew. 

"He turns the pad over and shows me this perfect shoe," Armstrong recalls.

The doodles help clarify the brainstorming process, Parker says, one that's a constant balance between what design wants and what business needs. 

"I think about balance a lot," Parker says. "Most of us are out of balance, and that's OK, but you need to keep your eye on the overall equilibrium to be successful."

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman meets with people individually.

Stoppelman has a one-on-one meeting with each of his direct reports every week. 

"Sometimes I feel like the company's psychiatrist," he shared on a Reddit AMA, "but I do feel like listening to people and hearing about their problems (personal and professional) cleans out the cobwebs and keeps the organization humming."

Evernote cofounder Phil Libin always brings a high-potential employee to participate.

At any given meeting at Evernote, there will be someone there who doesn't belong. 

This is by design. The cloud note-taking startup has an internal program called "officer training," in which employees get assigned to meetings that aren't in their specialty area to explore other parts of the company.

"They're there to absorb what we're talking about," Phil Libin says. "They're not just spectators. They ask questions; they talk."

Libin, who is Evernote's cofounder and former CEO, got the idea from talking with a friend who served on a nuclear submarine. To be an officer of such a sub, you had to know how to do everybody else's job. 

"Those skills are repeatedly trained and taught," he says. "And I remember thinking, 'That's really cool.'"

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to get people arguing.

If you work at Amazon, you'd better be comfortable with conflict. Jeff Bezos is famous for hating "social cohesion," that tendency people have for finding consensus for no other reason than it feels good. 

That distaste for agreeability is reinforced by Amazon's leadership principles, one of which reads: 

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

• Zack Friedman is the founder and CEO of Make Lemonade, a personal finance company.
• The following is an excerpt from his book, "The Lemonade Life: How to Fuel Success, Create Happiness, and Conquer Anything."
• In this excerpt, he describes having lunch with Warren Buffett in Omaha, and what he learned from him.
• Buffett expressed immense gratitude for everything he'd accomplished in his lifetime, and said he maximizes his happiness through his work, his charitable giving, his love of bridge, and his legendary junk-food diet.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

It's 12:35 p.m. in Omaha, Nebraska, and I'm having lunch with Warren Buffett.

We are eating at Piccolo's, which is one of Buffett's favorite restaurants and where he and Bill Gates also have dined together. Somehow, Buffett's root beer float is significantly taller, but it goes with the territory. After all, we're on his home turf, and he's Warren Buffett.

In 2016, a bidder on eBay paid $3,456,789 to have lunch with the Oracle of Omaha. Today, Buffett is picking up the tab. Earlier that morning at Berkshire Hathaway's headquarters, Buffett graciously hosted me and my classmates from Wharton Business School. For several hours, he openly and directly answered any question we asked, occasionally injecting his sharp sense of humor.

Pointing to the Coca-Cola products in the back of the room, Buffett quipped, "Berkshire owns a little over 8 percent of Coke, so we get the profit on one out of twelve cans. I don't care whether you drink it, but just open the cans, if you will."

We all sought to absorb Buffett's infinite wisdom, which we expected would be his take on the economy, investing, and business. The more I listened, however, I realized that the real "wisdom" was less about business and more about living your life with purpose, on your terms, with the things you enjoy, like a root beer float.

Buffett expressed immense gratitude for everything he'd accomplished in his lifetime. He is grateful to be alive. He's not trying to impress anyone or be like everyone else. He maximizes his happiness through his work, his charitable giving, his love of bridge, and his legendary junk-food diet, which he has compared to that of a 6-year-old. Warren Buffett knows who he is, and he's comfortable being himself.

After lunch, Buffett posed for countless photos. I'm not referring to the standard group shot where everyone lines up in rows, and he steps in the middle at the last second. For what must have taken nearly two hours, he posed for individual pictures with everyone. There were no bodyguards or assistants. He didn't owe us anything. But he couldn't have been kinder or more generous with his time.

At the end of our lunch, Buffett walked to his Cadillac and drove off into the Omaha afternoon.

While a person is unlikely to forget any part of a day spent with Warren Buffett, a few specifics about the man and the way he approaches life will always stand out to me.

1. He has a sunny outlook

Simply put, Buffett is happy. His long-term outlook on life and business is positive. He's a believer.

An open mind means access to more opportunities.

2. He takes calculated risks

As a value investor, Buffett adheres to certain principles that have guided his investment decisions and approach to risk. He especially loves the insurance business, which has taught him how to pay out less than he collects.

When you have a set of principles, you already know how to assess risk.

3. He does his own thing

Warren Buffett is not trying to be anyone other than Warren Buffett. He chose Omaha, not New York, and has lived in the same house since 1958, which he purchased for $31,500. He prefers cheeseburgers and root beer floats. The stock market's day-to-day movements don't worry him; he's playing a long game. 

There is a certain freedom that comes with independence.

Read more: At a Google team off-site, we were asked to play a personality game that clearly revealed why it's so hard for women to reach the top

4. He knows what he's good at

Buffett is genuinely good at being an investor, so that's where he has focused his time and energy. Likewise, he doesn't invest in things he doesn't understand.

Life is more efficient when you know who you really are.

5. He is a workhorse

Make no mistake: Warren Buffett is a workhorse, not a figurehead who shakes hands and gives speeches. He understands the details, does the analysis, and knows his business inside and out. He reached the pinnacle because he did, and continues to do, the work.

There are no shortcuts to greatness, and there is no escaping hard work.

I asked myself why Warren Buffett is so successful. Some may say he got lucky or that times were easier when he was starting out. But financial fortune aside, Warren Buffett is no different from you or me. He is the result of his choices.

Like Warren Buffett's, your life today is the result of choices. Some choices you made, while others were made for you.

What about your life tomorrow?

From the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep, you have an opportunity to define the next day of your life. Every day. That means each day is a new opportunity to choose the life you want. In the next several chapters, we'll discuss in detail how to make better choices that will broaden your perspective, how to take calculated risks, how to break free from the herd mentality, and most importantly, how to inspire action.

Zack Friedman is the founder and chief executive officer of Make Lemonade — a leading personal finance company that empowers you to live a better financial life — and an in-demand speaker. Previously, he was chief financial officer of an international energy company, a hedge fund investor, and worked at Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, and the White House. Zack holds degrees from Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

Taken from The Lemonade Life by Zack Friedman Copyright © 2019 by Zack Friedman. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership.

SEE ALSO: In the 1980s, Bill Gates would escape to a secret cabin in the woods to protect himself from burnout. Here's the modern-day, easier version of his approach.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Kylie Jenner is the world's second highest-paid celebrity. Here's how she makes and spends her $1 billion.

• There are many cultural differences between the Midwest and the East Coast of the United States.
• After living in both regions, I noticed some of the things that make them distinct, like the regional attitudes toward work, family, and fun.
• Here are 10 of the biggest differences I noticed between the Midwest and the East Coast.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Growing up on the West Coast, I often thought about the geography of the United States in rather simplistic terms.

There was the western half of the country that I was most familiar with, and then east of the Rockies, there was the part of the country that was flatter, greener, more densely populated, and more typically American.

After all, that's where the great American cities, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC were located, and where much of the history of the United States that I had learned about in school had played out. Although the American South was certainly more unique in my eyes, to me, the differences between the East Coast and the Midwest seemed minimal at best.

Since I started college in Chicago though, I have spent the majority of my adult life living, working, and studying on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and I've traveled extensively throughout both regions. And my perception of the two regions has changed drastically.

While neither region has a singular culture that defines all of it, I've realized that there are a host of cultural characteristics that make these two areas incredibly distinct from one another.

Here are 10 of the most striking differences I've noticed between the Midwest and the East Coast, from someone who's lived in both regions.

SEE ALSO: I moved from LA to a town of 2,300 people — here were the biggest culture shocks I faced in small-town America

DON'T MISS: I moved to the US from China — here are the biggest cultural differences I've noticed between the 2 countries

In the Midwest, life moves a bit more slowly than on the East Coast

Even though certain parts of the East Coast move more quickly than others, the region has a lot more hustle and bustle than the Midwest, where people are happy to take their time with daily life a little more.

Although they definitely still like to get to where they're going in a timely fashion, Midwesterners move from place to place less frantically and with less urgency than in the coastal cities of the East. If I had to guess, this is because in the Midwest, the distances between cities and towns is greater, and the region has a more rural character than much of the East Coast.

While the East Coast is often on the cutting edge of new trends, people in the Midwest tend to stick to what they know and love

New food trends, health crazes, and other cultural innovations tend to be popular in East Coast cities but can also spread to largely non-urban areas like the Catskills, Vermont, and Cape Cod, where many city-dwellers go to blow off steam.

In my experience, this is not the case in the Midwest, where tried-and-true pastimes have persisted across generations. Although people in cities like Chicago, Madison, and more recently Detroit tend to be trendier than other Midwesterners, they are happy to saddle up with a satisfying cheeseburger and a local beer instead of whatever health food happens to be in vogue.

Unlike certain places on the Eastern Seaboard like New York City, Midwesterners rarely feel like they are the center of the world

New Yorkers are often stereotyped as being self-important and acting like the world revolves around them.

While it wouldn't be fair to describe all New Yorkers this way, I have noticed that people from New York City and Washington, DC especially often have worldviews that center on events going on in their cities, perhaps understandably so.

In the Midwest though, people are much more modest about their position in the world, and are happy to keep it that way. Although Chicago obviously dominates the region politically and economically, this rarely leads its residents to behave as if they are superior to people in other places.

In the Midwest, having casual conversations with strangers is much more common than on the East Coast

Although you might exchange a few words with someone in passing here and there on the East Coast, casually striking up a conversation to bond with a stranger you are sharing a moment with is something that is more likely to happen in the Midwest.

East Coasters are not necessarily more standoffish, but tend to socialize in the same familiar groups more. Midwesterners on the other hand are more eager to meet someone new, be it over a drink, while shopping in a grocery store, or even while sharing a stressful train ride back from work.

The East Coast has a more competitive spirit than the Midwest

The East Coast tends to have more transient, short-term residents than the Midwest, and most of these newcomers are there to make it big — frequently either in finance, in media, in business, or in government. This means that people tend to be more competitive in their professional and personal lives.

While the Midwest's cities host go-getters of their own, most of them are from other parts of the region, resulting in attitudes that are slightly less cutthroat than those of some people on the East Coast.

From Washington, DC to New England, the East Coast is about hustling hard to get that high-powered job or promotion. The Midwest values hard work in a different way.

Although the East Coast's competitiveness is largely absent from the Midwest, this doesn't mean that people in the Midwest don't work hard.

But while people on the East Coast often equate hard work with advancing their careers, Midwesterners tend to value hard work itself because it makes them feel rooted, honest, and productive.

In short, while East Coasters prioritize where they are going in their work lives, Midwesterners are more focused on where they are right now.

On the East Coast, especially in cities like New York and Boston, people often have a direct, no-BS attitude. Meanwhile, the stereotypes about Midwestern niceness really are true — even in a metropolis like Chicago.

Although I had heard about "Midwest nice" even before I arrived, I never really appreciated how real it is until I spent time in the region. From Minnesota's folksy charm, to Missouri's southern-tinged hospitality, to Chicago's unpretentious openness, the Midwest truly embodies basic human kindness in a more direct way than the East Coast does. People there told me this is because of the Midwest's infamously cold winters — the more people you are friendly with, the warmer you'll be.

Chicago has frequently been compared to New York City, and while the two cities do have some things in common, Chicago remains a much cheaper and less ostentatious city, yet one that still has a world of experiences to offer.

The two main urban centers of the Midwest and East Coast, Chicago and New York respectively, both have a lifetime's worth of entertainment, restaurants, bars, and art galleries.

Due to its larger size and density, New York might have slightly more to offer, but Chicago has just as much diversity in terms of things to do and enjoy.

The difference between the cities though is that while New York wears its heart on its sleeve, Chicago's array of attractions is more understated, and by and large doesn't have the glitz and glamour of New York. However, this also makes the city much easier on the pocketbook.

While the East Coast is truly a melting pot, communities in Chicago and the Midwest tend to keep to themselves

Every city on the East Coast has a long history of welcoming immigrants from all over the world, and over the centuries, has created a melting pot where cultures have often blended together.

This happens in the Midwest, but to a much lesser extent — immigrant communities in cities like Chicago remain mostly socially segregated from one another, and have tended to form more rigid ethnic neighborhoods. This is also true in the rural areas, where Germans, Scandinavians, and other groups have settled in various regions of the Midwest and developed distinct local cultures of their own.

This difference has less to do with Midwestern society itself, and more to do with the histories of the Midwest's urban areas and with patterns of rural settlement.

While family and personal relationships are paramount in the Midwest, the East Coast is more about achievement

Of course, people in both regions value friendships, family, and maintaining healthy personal lives.

But while the East Coast tends to have a work-life balance that tips in favor of people's careers, studies, or professional progress, Midwesterners tend to view those around them as being more important. In this sense, people in the Midwest have a slightly more traditional approach to their lives, whereas East Coasters' views of their own fulfillment are constantly evolving.

• Emily Silgard is one of Business Insider's 30 people under 40 transforming of healthcare. 
• In the last year she got the opportunity to lead her own data science team, Hutch Data Commonwealth.
• Silgard told Business Insider the challenges of transitioning from a programmer to leading her own team and how she can best facilitate and improve the performance of her team. 
• Click here to see the full list of the 30 people under 40 who are transforming healthcare.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories. 

Emily Silgard, 36, began working at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a programmer seven years ago. This year, she got the opportunity to lead her own data science team, Hutch Data Commonwealth, overseeing three other researchers. 

Silgard's team spends half its time developing a natural language processing pipeline (how computers deal with human language) to advance oncology research by accessing clinical data from medical records more quickly.

The other half of the time the team members work with faculty at the University of Washington to develop predictive models, such as one that predicts the risk of emergency department visits over time for patients undergoing chemotherapy.

For her work, Business Insider named Silgard to our list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.

Click here to see the full list of the young leaders who are transforming US healthcare.

The challenges of becoming a manager

The transition to team lead felt natural, Silgard said, because she'd already worked alongside many of the same colleagues. Still, for Silgard there were some challenges she had to navigate.

As the data science manager, Silgard said she spends her time figuring out what researchers are interested in studying and how best to facilitate their needs. She also focuses on designing tools, creating better applications and services for researchers to use.  

One difficult aspect of the job for Silgard is maintaining the cultural norms of the office environment, such as clear communication and sustaining a high performance culture to reach certain research goals and criteria.  

"I spend a lot more time now on how to facilitate a productive work environment," Silgard said. "You really have to figure out what people are good at, what they're passionate about and how you can help them excel." 

The hardest adjustment for Silgard has been redefining what work means for herself. Being a programmer for a long time made the idea of work seem easily defined. 

Never miss out on healthcare news. Subscribe to Dispensed, our weekly newsletter on pharma, biotech, and healthcare.

"I had years where my work was sitting down writing code and I was able to measure the performance of my work," Silgard said.  

'It's a different type of work'

Now, Silgard spends a significant part of her time having conversations and meetings with colleagues, discussing how to improve the research and performance of her team. 

"It's a different type of work," Silgard said. "It's figuring out, how can we build mutually beneficial partnerships to get bigger things accomplished?" 

As team lead she realized the importance of these conversations and now sees the value in this new aspect of her work. 

But for Silgard, figuring out how to be a leader and manage a team of people is a skill she's acquiring naturally over time, she said.

It helps, Silgard said, that her team is good at communicating clearly and often voice their needs and expectations. That takes some of the burden of managing off Silgard's shoulders. 

"I'm surrounded with a group of naturally open, accepting, and thoughtful listeners and coders," Silgard said. "They also really lead that charge, it's not just me." 

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Teachers revealed to Business Insider the things they wish they could tell parents — but can't. 
• Teachers say kids will often lie to their parents about homework and class attendance. They would also caution parents against acting like over-involved, "helicopter" parents.
• Here are the 7 things teachers wish they could tell parents.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Teachers and parents can sometimes see very different sides of the same child. 

Most parents strive to see the best in their kids. While teachers often also want their students to achieve, they aren't as keen on making excuses for misbehaving children.  

Read more:THEN AND NOW: Here are all the ways being a public-school teacher has changed in the last 50 years

Business Insider spoke with a dozen teachers on the most common things they wish they could tell parents about their kids. Responses ranged from reminding parents that their children will often lie to cautioning them not to be over-involved "helicopter" parents.

(Business Insider verified the identities of all anonymous sources prior to publishing their responses. Responses are from K-12 public school teachers.)

Here are the 7 things teachers wish they could tell parents, but can't.

If you're a teacher with a story to share, email aakhtar@businessinsider.com.

SEE ALSO: Nurses reveal the 11 hardest parts of their job, from the death of patients to not having time to pee during a shift

Don't be a helicopter parent.

"You aren't doing your children favors by being a helicopter parent," said John, a middle and high school teacher from Pennsylvania.

Helicopter parenting describes mothers and fathers who hover around their kids by getting over-involved in schoolwork and what they do in their free-time. Two childhood development researchers coined the phrase in the 1990s, after US parenting transitioned from more hands-off to one that limits their child's independence. 

Today, mothers spend twice as much time with their kids and dads four times as much as they did 50 years ago. While active parenting is typically healthy for kids, somestudies have linked childhood "hovering" with with college age mental health issues, largely due, psychologists say, to violations of the needs people have for experiencing their own autonomy and competence as they grow up. 

"Failure is how we learn," John added. "It's ok to get a bad grade if you have earned a bad grade."

Keep up with your child's grades.

"We need to share the onus of your child's grades and behavior," a high school teacher from Mississippi who wished to remain anonymous said. "I keep on top of my 100 students as best I can, but when it comes down to it, I physically don't have the time to give a call home every time a student fails a paper or gets in an argument."

The teacher said she understands parents — particularly from low-income areas — may not have the time to keep up with their kids' grades, and would never yell at a parent for their child's grades. Yet they have found parents sometimes blame her for not giving their child enough attention, which she says is unfair.

"If we both want what's best for the student, I think we've got to be civil in understanding the strains present and working together toward that goal," they said.

Recognize that if your kid failed or got a bad grade, they probably deserved it.

Many teachers said that they would tell parents not to blame teachers if their kids received a bad grade. 

"Stop caring about grades so much," said a middle school teacher from Connecticut. "If your child gets a C, it's because they deserved it. I'm not grading your kid on a impossible standard, in fact I'm probably grading pretty easy."

"If your kid never shows up to class and has never handed in an assignment, they do not deserve a passing grade," said a teacher from New York who wished to remain anonymous. 

"It's okay that your child made a 'B,'" said a high school teacher from Texas who also wished to remain anonymous. "Quit telling me your child is a genius and has always made 'A's.' Your child is average, and that's not a horrible thing."

Understand that your kids will sometimes lie to you — it's a part of growing up.

"Your child is not innocent," said Andrea, a middle school teacher from New Jersey. Children are bound to make mistakes while they're growing up, she said, but blaming teachers instead of encouraging your kid to take responsibility won't allow them to learn. 

"If your child is not doing well in a class and blames it on the teacher, your child is lying," said a high school teacher in Virginia who wished to remain anonymous. "Your child is probably sleeping through class, or on her cell phone, or talking non-stop to everyone around her, or refusing to do any work, or not studying."

Be kind to teachers.

"Show compassion for teachers, we're people too," said a high school teacher from Ohio who wished to remain anonymous. "Teachers are not out to get students. We all want what's best for your kid even if they don't think so."

Realize your child isn't perfect.

"Your child is not perfect!" said an elementary school teacher from Virginia who wished to stay anonymous. "Don't tell me they don't behave the same way at home as they do at school."

Advocate for your kids.

A K-5 teacher from Illinois said she wishes she could tell parents to speak up for their kids if they feel they are not being treated fairly.

Parental "voices and involvement WILL determine their child's success," the teacher said. "A teacher is at the bottom of the food chain. We need to be careful what we say to parents."

"Please, ask us for help," said an elementary school teacher from Texas who wished to remain anonymous. "Don't expect me to remember to tell you. In a perfect world with only 20 students, that's doable, but I have 78 students."

• Billionaires can afford toys that most people can only dream of: private planes, penthouse apartments, and even entire islands.
• While some tech executives like Amazon's Jeff Bezos prefer partying on the yachts of their rich friends, others have purchased their own ritzy yachts complete with movie theaters and dance floors.
• Here are some of the tech elites who own private yachts.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Some billionaires, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, buy private planes to take control of the open skies — others purchase yachts to access the open seas.

There aren't too many tech billionaires who own personal yachts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for instance, doesn't have a yacht himself, but that doesn't stop him from cruising the ocean: he was pictured recently aboard the superyacht belonging to entertainment mogul David Geffen.

Read more:Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez partied with Lloyd Blankfein and model Karlie Kloss aboard billionaire David Geffen's superyacht

But the tech billionaires who do have yachts, like Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, reflect the view that yachts are for play: Their boats are decked out with amenities like gyms, spas, pools, nightclubs, and movie theaters.

If you want to find out what life is like aboard these multi-million-dollar yachts, some of them are available to rent out for a few nights or weeks at a time. For instance, chartering the yacht owned by Alphabet President Sergey Brin has cost past customers $773,000 a week.

Here are the yachts owned by tech billionaires:

SEE ALSO: Chocolate for breakfast and freshly killed goat for dinner. Here are the diets of notable tech billionaires.

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison owns a 288-foot yacht named Musashi that he acquired in 2013.

Source: Forbes

Ellison previously owned a bigger, 454-foot yacht called Rising Sun, which was designed specifically for the CEO in 2005. That yacht reportedly has 82 rooms, a movie theater, a wine cellar, and a basketball court. However, Ellison sold off the Rising Sun to music mogul David Geffen for a reported $300 million.

Source: Forbes, Boat International

Ellison's Musashi is a sister ship to the yacht of another billionaire, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert. However, the yacht, named Fountainhead, is often mistaken for belonging to billionaire investor Mark Cuban. "The guy who owns the boat tells everyone that it's mine," Cuban told Page Six in 2016. "It’s so crazy ... I don’t even own a boat."

Source: Page Six

Ellison's yacht reportedly influenced the decision of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get a boat himself. However, Jobs never set foot on the boat — the yacht was commissioned in 2008, but wasn't completed until 2012, a year after his death.

Source: Business Insider

When Jobs died in 2011, his yacht — along with his $14.1 billion fortune — was inherited by his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The 256-foot yacht in named Venus, and is worth $130 million.

Source: Business Insider

The Google cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are two of the richest people in the world, at No. 10 and No. 14, respectively. The two billionaires are known to splurge — in addition to each owning a superyacht, they both own private planes as well.

Sources: Forbes, Business Insider

Alphabet CEO Larry Page owns a yacht named Senses, an 194-foot boat costing $45 million that he bought in 2011 from a New Zealand businessman. The yacht has a private beach club with a Jacuzzi and sun beds, both indoor and outdoor dining areas, and a helicopter pad.

Source: Boat International

Meanwhile, Alphabet President Sergey Brin owns a longer, 240-foot yacht that he bought for a cool $80 million in 2011. It's reportedly the world's fastest superyacht, and is equipped with a dance floor and open-air cinema.

Source: Business Insider

Brin's yacht is named Dragonfly. The boat shares a name with Google's once-secret project to launch a censored search engine in China. It's still not clear whether Google has totally abandoned the project or not.

Source: Business Insider

But Brin and Page aren't the only two high-powered Google figures with yachts. Former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt owns a 194-foot yacht name Oasis. The yacht reportedly features a pool and a gym-turned-nightclub. He bought the boat in 2009 for a reported $72.3 million.

Sources: Business Insider, GQ

For Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, his interest in yachts skews toward racing and competitive sailing. Zennstrom has gone through a succession of boats named Ran, and his most recent purchase is the seventh in the series.

Source: CNN

The latest yacht, appropriately named Ran VII, is the most technologically advanced of all of Zennstrom's boats. The racing yacht uses electrical power, which Zennstrom says makes it "lighter, less drag, quieter, and most importantly it is environmentally friendly."

Source: CNN

The 40-foot yacht will compete in regattas through the racing team owned by Zennstrom and his wife, Catherine. The Ran Racing team launched in 2008 and has won some prestigious regattas.

Source: CNN

Barry Diller, chairman of digital media company IAC, co-owns a $70 million yacht with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Source: Business Insider

The sailing yacht, named Eos, is 350 feet long with six bedrooms. The power couple has hosted many celebrities over the years — a few that have been spotted aboard Eos include model Karlie Kloss, actor Bradley Cooper, journalist Anderson Cooper, and singer Harry Styles.

Source: W Magazine

For Jim Clark, the cofounder of Netscape, one yacht hasn't been enough. Clark has owned boats for more than 30 years, and in 2012, put up two of his sailing yachts for sale.

Source: Business Insider

Clark listed the boats for a combined $113 million: the 136-foot Hanuman for $18 million, and the 295-foot Athena for $95 million. However, as of 2016, Clark had yet to offload Athena. Clark also previously owned a 155-foot yacht named Hyperion, and currently also owns a racing yacht named Comanche.

Source: Boat International

Charles Simonyi worked at Microsoft until 2002 and oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office software. A few years before he left, Simonyi decided to purchase a yacht. He told the designer that wanted his yacht to be "home away from [his] home in Seattle."

Source: Boat International

The product of that conversation in 1999 is Simonyi's yacht named Skat, meaning "treasure" in Danish. The yacht measures 233 feet long, and is unique with its nontraditional design and gray color. Skat features a matching helicopter, a gym, and motorcycles.

Source: Yacht Charter Fleet

Opulent British billionaire Richard Branson owned a yacht, until he sold it this past September. The 105-foot catamaran sold for $3 million, significantly lower than the €8.5 million ($9.6 million) price Branson listed the boat for in 2014.

Source: Business Insider

Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, bought the boat in 2009. He named it Necker Belle, a nod to his private Caribbean island, Necker Island.

Source: Business Insider