A long and winding path of growth and self discovery led Elizabeth Story (‘99) to her profession as a physician of family medicine. Her love of the humanities, which was the subject of her undergraduate degree, took her toward teaching, Story always knew she wanted to be a doctor. And her life experiences — both in medicine and education — brought her full circle.
After high school, Story went to Wake Forest University in North Carolina where she studied religion and anthropology.
“While I had always wanted to be a doctor, I was really drawn to the humanities in college and briefly entertained the idea of pursuing a career in academics,” she said. “Some of my experiences traveling in Mexico and Guatemala for my anthropology degree renewed my interest in medicine and I moved back to Texas to complete my prerequisites for medical school.”
She completed those at UT Dallas and went to medical school at Texas A&M Health Science Center in College Station.
“Initially I matched into Radiology after medical school, but after two years of training, decided that family medicine was a better fit for my personality and skills,” she said. “After finishing my training at John Peter Smith hospital in Fort Worth, I briefly worked there as an attending physician but ultimately decided to join Dr. James Bohnsack’s private practice, located in southwest Fort Worth.”
After college I got a master’s degree in religion from Wake Forest.
“I had started some service-learning projects in college that I wanted to continue to work on and so getting a master’s degree was a good fit at the time,” she said. “In hindsight, it didn’t contribute much to my current path other than to help advance my Spanish skills and help me hone my writing, but I don’t regret going that route. Quite honestly it was during a time of uncertainty as far as deciding where to take my career, so it definitely helped solidify that I didn’t want to become a professor and teach religion.”