There and Back Again
-
College.
-
I attended Pitzer College in Claremont, California. This college is one of the five Claremont Colleges... Let's see, there's Pomona, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd and Pitzer, yep, five. Although each of these colleges is quite small (Pomona is the largest with a massive 1200 students) you have the advantage of being able to take classes at each of the five colleges. They each specialize in a different area. I like to think of it as a system that gives you the small college feel (teacher to student ratio) with a large college's variety of available courses. I guess you might say that I liked it there.
-
Graduate School.
-
For graduate school I made the trek across the country to New York (The Bronx, or De Bronx if you're a native). I studied at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the scenic Pelham Parkway area (near Orchard Beach). Not exactly scenic and the "beach" was a strip of sand on Long Island Sound. You might say that I didn't like New York (O.K. I hated New York). It's not exactly my style. I tend to be more of an outdoor person. I spent a great deal of my time up in Westchester County away from the main city life. I think this allowed me to survive the stresses involved in getting my Ph.D. in Microbiology. Luckily, immediately afterward, I escaped New York and began my Post-doctoral work here in the Bay Area at Stanford University. After Stanford, I spent a couple years at the University of Hawaii, about seven years at the University of Nebraska and have settled at Texas A&M University College of Medicine in College Station, Texas (Go Aggies!!).
Jeffrey D. Cirillo
[email protected]