Bouncing Up: Resilience and Women in Academic Medicine.

Lone woman in a sea of suits It is a miracle I am here. I mean that both figuratively and literally. On a cool March day in Chicago in 1980, I waited anxiously with my Rush University classmates to learn where we matched for residency. Would I match to UCLA? UC San Diego? UCSF? One after one, the names were ticked offdexcept mine. The speakers made it through the pomp and circumstance of their match list without mentioning me. I was horrified. I asked a friend to check on what was clearly a mistake. Sure enough, my match slip had accidentally dropped to the floor. I learned that I would be heading to UCLA. Thank goodness the Windy City did not blow that slip to oblivion! So it is a miracle I am here. And if that was not a close call, I learned years later that the probability of my matching to a residency had been reduced, not through lack of merit, and not by an accidental drop of paper on the floor. A vascular surgery fellow who had worked with me as a sub-intern told me that Paul Ebert, then chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, had removed all women from the UCSF match list because he said he would not accept them into the program. Although that eliminated one of my residency choices, I still succeeded in securing a surgery residency. You could say I beat the odds. My grandfather told me at a young age that people like Paul Ebert would tell me I cannot do certain things, and that I would need to tell them I can. I was just 6 years old and had skipped the first grade. He passed away a year after he spoke those words of wisdom. Somehow he knew that throughout my life I would encounter obstacles, particularly from people who did not view boys and girls as equal. My grandfather inspired me to forge