Her Story
About Rachel
I grew up in South Florida at the side of a successful female surgeon - my mother is an oculoplastic and orbital surgeon. In college, I went to Harvard, where I got my bachelor's in integrative biology and became very interested in biomedical and translational sciences, which is why I decided to pursue a PhD afterwards. But partway through my PhD, I realized that I really wanted to be in active patient care, learning from patients and determining how we can best identify solutions for the problems they face in their day-to-day life, so I made the switch to pursuing medicine. While in medical school, I had an incredible opportunity to work on glaucoma research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and it was during that experience that I became interested in glaucoma risk assessment and glaucoma screening and started working on my startup. I attend a medical school in Florida that doesn't have an ophthalmology residency program, so I had to be pretty creative about finding mentorship in ophthalmology in order to secure a residency match and to be able to gain experience in the field. I am most proud of matching to residency at the University of Virginia Ophthalmology - it's an incredibly competitive specialty to get a residency match in, and I'm very excited to train there. My areas of expertise include ophthalmology as well as medical education and navigating medical school, where I do a lot of mentorship in that space.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Rachel
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say that I have always been an incredibly curious person, and I was raised to be confidently curious by my parents, so I've never been afraid to ask questions and to ask for help. I think that has been sort of the standard of success for me, because I have always been comfortable asking for things that I needed in order to pursue what I was interested in. And I've never been afraid to be incorrect or to ask a question when I don't know the answer.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. I pursued a PhD and realized partway through that it wasn't the right path for me, and I wouldn't redo it, even if I had the chance to. I think that going after things, even if they might end up being mistakes, is always worthwhile, taking risks from that perspective. I think that, particularly as women, we experience a higher degree of imposter syndrome than men, and I think that that can oftentimes lead to not being willing to take the same risks and make the same mistakes, which can hold us back.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One challenge is that I attend a medical school in Florida that doesn't have an ophthalmology residency program, so I had to be pretty creative about finding mentorship in ophthalmology in order to secure a residency match and to be able to gain experience in the field. The other challenge is that as someone in medical school founding a startup, there's not much infrastructure for pursuing business as a medical trainee. It's not something that's a classically supported route, so I've had to seek out and kind of create my own path in that space as well.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
In my professional life, patient care is the most important value to me. I think creating a medical field that serves patients in such a way that not only provides them with compassionate and holistic care currently, but also seeks to make the future of medicine better for them is key. And in my personal life, I think that being reliable has been sort of the foundation of who I am and who I seek to be, being the person who is dependable for friends and family and even acquaintances.
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