PEARL: Hold onto your horses, folks. This is my life.

Hello all,

This is the start of what will hopefully become a regular chronicle of my life at Emory med school. Before I begin sharing tidbits of my life with you, the hypothetical future Emory student, I’ve written out an introduction to my life – a little bit of context for future entries. Enjoy!

The easiest way to explain my life is to introduce my family. My father is a boatbuilder, who grew up in Tennessee, joined the Coast Guard after high school (claiming he never would have made it through college and certainly didn’t want to go to Vietnam), and then met my mother on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My mama grew up in the Midwest, the daughter of an English war bride and a first generation German-American, who dropped out of her conservative college in the Midwest at her first opportunity and promptly moved to the Outer Banks so that she could be where the wild horses live. My oldest sister Wendy, fifteen years older than me, now lives in Miami where she works as a public defender and spends her weekends jetting about Miami Harbor with her friends on her boat. My sister Belle runs my father’s boat shop in Maine and has truly earned her spot in my mama’s heart by having two daughters (Daisy age 6, Anna 4) and one son (Ryder, 10 months). I am by far the baby of the family, totally spoiled with excessive education (three years at the state’s math & science magnet school in far northern Maine surrounded by potatoes, followed by four great years at the University of Chicago). I decided to follow up Chicago with Emory because I loved the people I met there, felt like the faculty and staff were especially supportive, and really wanted to train at Grady. As I figure it, the warm weather is just a bonus – but a fantastic bonus. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t go south because there are no seasons. Seasons are way overrated, as you’ll discover for yourself when it’s 70 degrees in January (!). Life at Emory is great – I get to learn science and medicine by day, have fun with my classmates on the football field and out dancing on the weekends, and take occasional trips to South Georgia where I’ve learned to shoot a shotgun and eaten raw peanuts straight from the ground. In addition to football, I like to play soccer, basketball, and volleyball and then climb or play tennis when I’m not playing team sports. Other than that, I watch football (go Patriots!) and spend my time cooking, eating, and being merry.

That’s all for now – I’ll check back in with y’all soon!