Orlee Marini-Rapoport
Thesis Title: “Have the Husband Press the Plunger of the Syringe”: Donor Insemination and the Production of Normalcy in the Early Cold War United States
What Now: Research Technician in the Center for Immunology & Inflammatory Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital
What Next: MD/PhD and a career as a physician-scientist
I fell in love with the study of history in an HL90 seminar my freshman fall. I found magic in using historical context to understand our present day. I loved History & Literature’s emphasis on the use of literature, broadly defined, to understand the past. I had assumed that I would go to law school or a JD/PhD program with a particular focus on legal history, or that perhaps I might become a history professor. I was, and still am, fascinated by the early Cold War era.
Right before my junior year, I met a physician-scientist while dealing with my own medical issues who helped me discover a career path I didn’t even know existed and I realized, remarkably quickly, that I wanted to pursue academic medicine. At that point, I did not have a single science course on my college transcript; my class schedule had been full of humanities classes, with a particular emphasis on gender & sexuality and 20th century America. I started taking premed courses the next semester, began working in an immunology lab, and added a second concentration in Human Developmental & Regenerative Biology. I’m currently working full-time in that same lab and will be applying to MD/PhD Programs next year, with a particular interest in studying what initiates dysregulation of the immune system.
Ironically, then, what defined my time in History & Literature was an inconveniently timed realization, halfway through college, that I wanted to go to medical school.
But choosing History & Literature was not a mistake. Rather, concentrating in History & Literature and focusing on medicine during the early Cold War was the most profoundly meaningful, defining choice I made in college, both before and after I became premed. I would not have been the same researcher in the lab, the same student in organic chemistry, the same future physician without the interdisciplinary perspective instilled in me by History & Literature. What this concentration has provided me – the historical perspective, the conceptual framework, the ability to turn complex thoughts into coherent writing – has altered my outlook in ways so deep I don’t think I’m entirely aware of them. And it has provided me with analytical tools my peers in the sciences haven’t been given.