Dr. Jennifer Wallace
Hollins Class Of 1992
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The Complete Transcript--The First Interview
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Dr. Jennifer Wallace Hollins Class Of 1992 |
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| Internal Links The Complete Transcript--The First Interview |
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External Links |
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Her Childhood I was born in 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland….Both my parents worked for the federal government, as civilian employees, and so…we traveled a lot during my childhood. Baltimore was always home base…but…throughout my childhood we lived in various places, the longest of which was in northern Japan…for four years. That was from the ages of six to ten….Japan was probably the most influential….I lived in Germany for a year….And then we also…lived back and forth, back and forth to Baltimore. I’m the oldest of two…children….my father was from Baltimore originally…my mother…is from Maine, a small town in rural Maine….she actually went to Smith College, which was another women’s college…and I think that’s why. It was her influence made me choose Hollins. And, actually I pretty much only exclusively looked at women’s colleges when I was picking a college….And, then my brother was born in 1974, so he’s four years younger. It’s just the two of us….because…we went back and forth to Baltimore, I really am close with my father’s family, but…we would go up north to Maine and visit my mother’s family…for the summer, and, you know, Christmas holidays and things like that. I sort of consider Baltimore my home town. I’d always loved kids, I mean, even when I was, you know, in high school and in middle school, when I was a swimmer then…it was all age groups went swimming, meaning that kids from age five up to age eighteen on a team. So the older kids would always take the younger ones under their wing. I was one of those older kids who was always hanging out with the little kids. You know, I was the kid that was the baby-sitter of the neighborhood, I baby-sat and baby-sat and baby-sat….Then even, through Hollins…in summers and when I was home on vacations, I was usually baby-sitting across the street at the neighbor’s house, and my summers…at Hollins, I would come home and I would work, I worked at a local pool, coached the swim team for the kids, and…taught swimming lessons to the really little ones, so I always loved working with little kids. Sound Clip: Dr. Wallace talks about the impact Hollins had on her life The World Of Medicine …It is a very male-dominated world, especially in surgery and stuff like that….I think that when you’re in medical school, especially, ‘cos there is such a power dynamic difference anyways between the attending surgeon…and the medical student, you’re so intimidated anyways, and then there are still some male surgeons out there who just don’t believe that women should be in medical school, period, and especially shouldn’t be going to the OR or anything like that, because they…believe that, you know, you’re not going to dedicate your entire life to medicine, it’s kind of a waste to educate you. …In those other professions, you definitely felt it, and you would, as a woman, they would pick you to go see the gall bladder removal for the fifteenth time and, yet, one of the guys would get picked to go do the really cool, brand-new, laparoscopic kidney removal, which sounds like, you know, they’re both surgeries so whaddya care, but it really does matter, and…you’re there for an education and you’re really there to get exposed to as much as possible, and being chosen to go into the fifteenth same operation again is really not benefiting you, as far as your education goes, especially someone like me, who wasn’t gonna be a surgeon, so really I was there just to get exposed to as much as possible, to see as much as possible, so that way later on in my career I could advise a patient, you know, what’s it like to have your kidney removed, well here’s what they do in the OR, you know, like, so it really was to my benefit to my future career far more than some other guy who’s gonna go into surgery, for me to see as much as possible. But…there’s still a lot of jobs in medicine that I couldn’t do, because I wouldn’t be able to take [my daughter] in with me if I had to, you know, admit a very sick baby in the intensive care unit or something like that, so, there is still a lot of inflexibility that has to do with the hours, you know, we have to cover sick patients twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but more and more jobs are doing job-sharing and things like that or a woman’ll work part time and not take any call, so I think that things are opening up. It’s very, very flexible in family practice and in pediatrics and in internal medicine. It’s less flexible in surgery…but it’s getting better. But I did see a lot of women in my med school class who chose specialties not because they particularly loved that specialty, and I love pediatrics, that was an easy choice for me, but because they knew that eventually the hours would be good. And so they made those sacrifices. …I think my real choice came when I was in medical school, and, I was miserable after my first year, after, especially after going away to summer camp that summer, and coming back and looking at the second year and going, oh, do I want to do this again. For me, that was when the choice came, was really, do I want to stay and do this, or do I not. And, obviously I chose to stay, and, I think making that commitment was key. I think the other thing that was key…was that, you know, when you go to medical school, you’ve gotten basically straight A’s in high school and college. You have to, to get into medical school. So you’re used to being perfect, and you’re used to working hard to being perfect, but, you know, you’re also, most people tend to be smart and so, yes, you’re working hard but it comes naturally to you too. When you get to med school, everybody there has gotten straight A’s…everybody there’s used to being perfect, and yet you’re still being graded on a curve, so some people have to get C’s. And, my first year I worked my tail off, and…I got almost straight A’s, but I was one hundred percent miserable. And I think going to summer camp that summer and making me sort of realize there is an outside world, you know, the world of medicine is not all-inclusive. There is an outside world. I thought, you know what, it’s okay to get C’s. C’s mean you pass. And C’s mean you’re gonna be a doctor. But, I had to give myself permission to do that. Adoption …I was a single person, I hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, if he’s out there, he can come knocking at my door at any time…I’d be thrilled, and, you know, all my friends, really, because people in med school, you sort of miss your twenties, so, I wasn’t really worried about getting married, because I was so busy being in med school, and all my friends got married…I went to twenty-something wedding showers and I think I…was in seven weddings, and…then you get into your thirties and all your friends are having babies. And of course I love babies and children, I mean that’s what I chose to do for my life, and so while I didn’t miss getting married, I really missed having a family. And once I finished my residency and once I was in a job where I knew it would be easy to…support a child, but, and also with my call and everything, being a physician, I really had to, to weigh, you know, what I could do and couldn’t do as a single parent with a kid. And I knew I was in a good place, and then…it came down to, do I wanna get pregnant, which nowadays you totally can through artificial insemination…or do I wanna adopt. And I probably struggled with that question for about six months. I was totally comfortable being a single parent, there was no prob, I didn’t struggle with that at all. But I really struggled with, do I need to have a biological child, or can I adopt. And, and then one day it kinda hit me. I’ve been loving other people’s children…my entire life! I mean, there are plenty of patients I took care of that I would’ve taken home in an instant…had fate allowed me to. And I just realized that I didn’t feel the overwhelming need to have a biological child. I…just didn’t. Some women do. But I just, I didn’t feel that need, and I knew that I could have…an adopted child and I knew I would love her just like anything else, and, so, that sort of made my decision to adopt. …There’s nothing that irks me more than being introduced to a new group of people as, you know, here’s Jen Wallace and this is her adoptive daughter Lizzie. No, this is Jen Wallace, and this is her daughter Lizzie….But people still do that, and, you know, there are times when I correct them if it’s the right time and there are times when I don’t. Or, when people always say, oh, what, where are her real parents? I am her real parent. They are her biological parents. You know, just like trying to correct the terminology and make people sorta understand. I think…if we could be ambassadors in a little way, I try….There are times when you don’t feel like it, like when you get asked for the twentieth time, while standing in line at Home Depot, where is she from? Well, I’ve gotten to the point sometimes where, she’s from Hershey, Pennsylvania. And just move on….And then there are other times when, you’re willing to sit down and talk and talk to people… Activism …What Milton Hershey School does is we take…kids from all fifty states, we do a focus on Pennsylvania specifically…but we have kids from all over, who are in social and financial need, they live…below the poverty level, we have a lot of kids who live in shelters…actually, a lot of kids have been living in cars, that when they come to us, they literally come to us with the clothes on their backs. We actually took in a lot of kids from Hurricane Katrina recently….So they have a financial need, as well as a social need. The social need, I think, impacts them more than their financial need. I think the kids learn to live with whatever amount of money they have, kids don’t really know about money, but, the social needs of our kids are huge….Most of them come from single-parent families, a lot of them have been victims of abuse themselves…a lot of them…have parents who are in jail or are drug users. And what the school does is, the school takes them in, provides all the rooming, housing, and board, provides their education, even the four-year-olds board on campus. They live with a married couple who take care of ten other kids, so it’s a dorm, but it’s more of a home-setting dorm, and then, they’re taken care of until age eighteen, and if they have a good time, they graduate from high school, which most of the kids do, they get a hundred percent free ride to college. So you’ve taken this kid, who has come from nothing, and has really, I call it minus nothing, because, really, the social need impacts them so much. And everything is provided for them when they’re a child, and then, they’re given this amazing opportunity, as an adult, to better themselves. I think that activism can be very big or very small. I don’t think you need to be out there carrying signs, picketing on the front steps of the Capitol. I think that activism just means trying in your own way to improve the life of even one person….And if you do that, I think you’re being active, and I think you are helping. I also think there’s a component of activism of trying to change the public’s perception of something….Whether that is…through writing policies, which is what I do through the school all the time…to speaking out about the school and promoting health care for underprivileged kids. There’s an element of trying to educate other people about it. |