>> So, I went to Pomona College.
I actually knew coming in that I wanted to do medicine,
although I wasn't sure what part of medicine I wanted to do.
My dad's a physician; my mom's a nurse, and so I'd had a lot of medical exposure growing up.
And both of them told me, do something in college that's not medical
because you won't have another chance to do that later.
So, I actually majored in Religious Studies at Pomona, and then went on to medical school
at George Washington University in Washington D.C. And then after medical school--
that was where I decided to do pediatrics--
I still wasn't sure beyond pediatrics, what I wanted to do.
After medical school, to become a pediatric ICU doc, you do three years of pediatric residency,
and then three years of ICU fellowship.
So, it's six years after medical school.
And I did all that in Colorado, at the University of Colorado,
and I decided during residency that I just like the whole body physiology that you see
in the ICU that you don't see so much in a lot of other specialties.
So, there's a lot of interviewing and traveling around the country,
and one of the difficult things about medicine is
that you're doing that every three or four years.
So, as you interview for medical schools, you're picking a place to live.
As you interview for residencies,
you're interviewing again, to move likely some place new.
As you're interviewing for a fellowship, you're again, interviewing to move some place new.
And then looking for that first job out of fellowship, I think is complicated
because you've been exposed to academic medicine your whole career thus far,
and there's a lot more options once you're done training, so you have academic jobs,
which is what I ended up taking, you have private practice jobs, and then you have a mix.
Where you have a private practice doctor that's working in an academic hospital
and has some combination, and I think trying to sort out all
of those differences is really important and difficult because you just don't have a lot
of experience yet to make those decisions.
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