"I totally love my job -- I can't believe I get paid to do it."

Why psychiatry?
"After getting my BA in English, I took some graduate level English courses. But I noticed that nobody seemed to be enjoying the novels at all -- they were too busy looking for arcane things to analyze. I decided I wanted to be more practical and productive. After the subjectiveness of the liberal arts, I enjoyed the clarity and structure of medical school. But I didn't really love it until my psychiatry rotation. Psychiatry captured some of what I loved about being an English major -- it combined medical knowledge with an exploratory, inquisitive, humanistic approach."

Why Duke?
"I had been so happy as a Duke undergrad that even walking across the campus for my interview brought up a lot of positive associations. The weather is wonderful -- having so many days of blue sky each year really does make a difference. The quality of the program is very competitive with those at other leading institutions. Every field is represented. There's a wide range of training options and good supervision throughout. And the faculty are not only very strong, but very approachable."

On rediscovering the city she thought she knew
"When I was getting my BA at Duke, my life revolved around the campus, and Durham itself had seemed kind of uninteresting. So getting reacquainted with Durham and discovering how much it has to offer has turned out to be a nice surprise."

Year by year, getting better all the time
"I'm in my third year now, and I totally love my job³I can't believe I get paid to do it. During the first year, it's all so new that you're often insecure about what you're doing. In the second year, you get down to the treatments and you get more autonomy. The third year is unbelievable. You're seeing patients in outpatient settings, and you have them for a year or two. So you get to see what works and mesh everything you've learned together. It's a very rich experience."

Why it takes a community to make a psychiatrist
"I had a lot of inaccurate preconceptions about what community mental health patients would be like. For example, I recently saw a patient who'd been in jail several times. I wasn't eager to see him, because I figured he was in clinic under duress. But he's actually very eager to turn his life around. He keeps up with his appointments, takes his meds, and really wants to talk about what got him to where he is and to learn different, non-violent ways to respond to people. Patients like him are medication naİve, and I'm the first psychiatrist they've ever seen, so everything I do is the first time it's been tried. That makes it a fantastic learning experience."