orb28: Why did you want to become a doctor? What inspired you?
Vanessa VanStee: A lot of people in my family are nurses or physicians. My mother was a nurse and my grandmother and uncle were physicians. I had a lot of exposure to the medical field and heard stories about medical work from my family while I was growing up.

orb28: What education did you go through?
VVS: I completed my high school education and went to a four-year college. Then I spent two years working on my master’s degree, which is not required for becoming a doctor, but I did it anyway. (I did not have to do my master's degree but I found engineering interesting -- my father and grandfather were engineers -- and I had an incredible offer of a full scholarship to do it so I felt that it was worthwhile to do. I also felt better prepared for medical school and was able to study further in a very interesting field.) After that I went to medical school for four years. Next, I did my internship and residency, where I had on-the-job training and got paid for my work. Then I was able to practice medicine. Recently, I have gone back to training and am working on a fellowship in Allergy and Immunology.

orb28: What kind of tests do you take in medical school and in other places you work in?
VVS: The tests I had to take were called board exams. There are three parts to them, and you take them in different years. You take two parts while you’re in medical school, and take one part in residency. When you pass that, you can be licensed as a physician. After I finished my residency, I took an exam to be board-certified in internal medicine. After passing that exam, you have more opportunities to do other kinds of work and to go on to subspecialty training if you wish to.

orb28: What kind of work did you do in medical school? What did you learn?
VVS: The first two years consisted of doing a lot of class work for anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, pathology, neurology, neuroanatomy, behavioral medicine, and those sorts of classes. We read a lot of books and took tests on that material. In anatomy and physiology class, students also dissect a human body (not every school does that, but most do if they have availability). In that course, you’re in a classroom and they show you pictures, and then you do work in the lab with the teachers. Teachers help you dissect the body and identify the anatomy, and then test you. It’s a good way to get experience working with the human body. The last two years are clinical, which you spend in the hospital taking care of patients with supervising physicians who help you. During those two years as you’re in the hospital, you rotate through different specialties to get an idea of what you like best so you can apply for the specialty you enjoy for your residency. Some specialties are gynecology, surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and psychiatry. Usually you spend about two or three months in internal medicine, surgery, and pediatrics, and about one to two months in obstetrics. In your final years of medical school you have choices of what you can do for rotations — if you want to do further surgery rotation or internal medicine, or if you want to go into a subspecialty like allergy and immunology or cardiology and take a more specific focus.

orb28: What qualifications does a person need to work as a doctor?
VVS: You have to go to an accredited medical school and get adequate training, pass the board exams, and then apply for an official license. In order to take the last part of the board exam, you need to have at least one year of internship.

orb28: Why did you decide to specialize in Allergy and Immunology?
VVS: The whole subspecialty of Allergy and Immunology is interesting to me. It encompasses problems that affect many people. Treating patients with asthma can significantly impact their quality of life. The Immunology part of it is interesting because basically every disease processed by your body ties into what your immune system is doing. To me, it’s very interesting to learn about those processes and how to evaluate them. And then, if there’s a problem with a person’s immune system, it’s good to be able to potentially alter that and make their immune system stronger – more able to fight off diseases.

orb28: What is a typical day in your life like?
VVS: Each day is a little bit different. First I’ll go to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and go to the pediatric and allergy clinic. I’ll see kids that have problems with their immune system, or have allergies or asthma, and I’ll take care of them. In the afternoon, I go to the adult clinic to review charts, prescriptions for patients, or see walk-in patients who come in and are ill.

orb28: What types of patients do you see?
VVS: I see kids and adults. I see people who have potential problems with allergies, asthma, or problems with their immune system. Children who get frequent infections like pneumonia and bronchitis may have problems with their immune system. My job is to figure out why they keep getting those infections and how to fix that problem, if possible.

orb28: What do you like most about being a doctor?
VVS: I like being able to take care of patients who need help with their medical problems. It’s really interesting and rewarding to have, for example, a child who has chronic ear infections or chronic pneumonia and to evaluate lab tests to help them in different ways very easily, and then help them not have frequent infections. They’ll feel much better and healthier. It’s also nice to be able to treat people who have asthma or allergies and get them to be able to feel much better and to be more productive and not be sick in a hospital. The amount of time it takes to get to this point is considerable, but I’m enjoying it a lot and I’m glad that I decided to become a doctor.

orb28: What’s the hardest part about your career?
VVS: The hardest part is probably people you can’t cure. You can treat many diseases to a point, but not always cure. There are people who die of different problems that we can’t fix.

orb28: What are some things you learned about allergies that most people don’t know about?
VVS: There are ways to treat different types of allergies. I’ve learned things in particular about children with allergies and which ones they tend to potentially outgrow and which ones will be with them potentially lifelong. For example, some food allergies in babies may be outgrown while others are more likely to remain. I have learned how to evaluate and treat people with allergies and immune dysfunction and how to treat people with difficult-to-control asthma.

orb28: Is it harder for women to go into the medical field than men?
VVS: It used to be more difficult for women to gain admission to medical school – for example, when my grandmother went to medical school very few women were accepted, and she was only one of two women in her class. But these days, it’s much easier and the percentage of women in medical school is increasing steadily, though in most medical schools it does not yet match the number of men.

orb28: How hard is it to get a fellowship? How many people apply each year and how many are accepted?
VVS: Each specialty is different; in the case of Allergy and Immunology there are between 70 and 80 programs in the country. Each program has one to four spots a year, which means there are around 100 to 200 spots available per year total. There are two or three spots for my program: three first years and two second years. The number of positions available is determined based on the amount of funding from the federal government or alternative sources for the training of fellows in that specific area. Allergy and Immunology is actually very difficult to get into because there are not that many spots in the country, and it is something a lot of people are interested in right now, so most programs that have one to three spots receive well over one hundred applications for that opportunity – sometimes as many as 200 or more applications.

orb28: What advice do you have for girls who want to become doctors?
VVS: Really do the best you can in science and try to learn as much as you can. Get good grades, especially in college, and take all the prerequisite courses you’ll need for medical school, such as biology, chemistry, and physics. If you are interested in pursuing medicine as a profession, never give up. Try to find out more about it, talk to doctors you know, and do as best you can in classes. If you don’t have a lot of exposure to the medical field, it would be a very good idea to shadow a doctor. When you shadow a doctor you’ll get an idea of what they do day to day, and you’ll see if being a doctor is something you really want to do.

Educational Steps to Becoming a Physician