Dear Kehillah Community,

I recently visited Kehillah on a trip home. While chatting with former teachers, I realized how much the school paved the way for me to find my career path and make a meaningful impact on the world. Spoiler alert, it isn't the path I thought it would be, but I am all the better for it! 

The last panoRAMa from Ms. Vicenty touched on the way Kehillah connects students to their interests and passions in the outside world, and I am living proof of that. During my four years at Kehillah, I took courses such as Biotechnology, Anatomy & Physiology, Intersection of Jewish Law, Ethics & Medicine, and Sex & Gender in Kaballah, all of which strengthened my interests in medicine and ethics. I learned practical biological lab techniques like pipetting, plating samples, and running genetic assays as well as ethical considerations in medicine and cultural aspects of sex and gender identity. In Biotechnology, we actually built a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) machine that allowed us to analyze the sizes of genetic materials and make conclusions about the genetic content of various biological samples. The deep understanding that I gained from participating in the construction of such an elaborate machine has been extremely useful all throughout my studies (more on that later).

After graduating from Kehillah, I received my bachelor's degree in biology and bioethics from the University of Puget Sound. Until that point, I thought I was headed to medical school. However, in reflecting on my learning experiences at Kehillah, I realized that my passion for medicine centered on reproductive science. I pivoted to a Reproductive Science and Medicine master's program at Northwestern University and to my ultimate career as an embryologist.

During my graduate program, I worked on several research projects that blended concepts that I learned at Kehillah both in ethics and science courses. My most recent research project involved elucidating the genetic cause for chemoresistance in ovarian cancers, which heavily utilized PCR assays and analysis of complex data – skill sets I had already been introduced to at Kehillah!

Now I spend my days in a lab, helping couples realize their dream of creating a family. We process eggs and sperm to generate embryos as well as perform genetic testing and transfer embryos to achieve healthy pregnancies.

I am beyond grateful for my experience at Kehillah, and I carry those memories and skill sets with me every day, in my always-evolving career.