While still an undergraduate student, she was invited on to a research team investigating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and, inspired by one of her lecturers, added an honours year to her Bachelor degree. In 2012, Teilah graduated on the Vice Chancellor’s List with first class honours and, in her own quiet way, decisively reinforced the notion that ‘you don’t have to begin as a high flyer to become one’. Now on the backburner, medicine will have to wait until Teilah satisfies her curiosity for research. At present, she continues her work on a postgraduate doctorate as part of a research team at Griffith University’s Menzies Health Institute, where she enjoys working on scientific research projects centred on the process of discovery and innovation. Driven by a curiosity to understand how the human body functions when challenged by disease, she welcomed the unexpected opportunity to contribute to research with a focus on clinical translation. While her journey began with the goal of traditional medicine, it is research that has captured Teilah’s attention. Twice tempted by invitations to medical school interviews, she has chosen to keep her focus on research. Completing my PhD has given me the time to investigate and explore intricate details of the human body. At the same time, research projects have afforded me the patient contact I originally sought in traditional medicine. I am also developing the professional and clinical skills that are necessary in a medical career. Patient stories emerge from patient interactions and they follow me into the laboratory where they provide me with the motivation to achieve and report valid outcomes to help understand disease. I find great comfort and satisfaction in the fact that all of what is currently known and taught in medicine has been discovered through research. It is a privilege to be a part of that.
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JULIE’S WAY ‘Mr Seaha, I changed my career over the weekend! On Friday I was working in my office in London and on Monday I started classes at Sydney University Medical School’. This single quotation goes a long way towards describing Julie (2002). The epitome of a Grammar Girl, she is intelligent, driven, and unafraid. In 2003, she earned a place to study engineering at Cambridge University beginning in September. In the interim, she decided to spend semester one studying engineering and law at Sydney University ‘because I won a scholarship and didn’t want to waste the opportunity’. Cambridge exposed me to a wide range of professionals who came to talk to us about careers. Like my experience at Brisbane Girls Grammar School, I was encouraged to be curious and adventurous; to seek and take every opportunity as it presented itself. There I began to understand the concept of transferable skills. I started to see how the diverse interests and experiences of my early life had begun to fuse into the foundations of my career. Julie spent her first summer internship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A focus on bioengineering planted the seed of interest in health careers. A second-year summer internship at Goldman Sachs followed and, at the end of her third year at Cambridge, she won a Women in Investment Banking Scholarship which included another summer internship in the finance industry, this time at Lehman Brothers.
Teilah’s journey is not one taken by many. It is certainly longer than most, but it is the path of a young woman who is ‘in no rush’.
For nearly three years following the completion of a Masters in Engineering, Julie worked for JP Morgan as an investment banker. She was happy and successful there until she found herself becoming more and more interested her husband’s medical studies. ‘I discovered that I could sit the GAMSAT in London’. And so, somewhat reliant on fate, Julie booked a place.
‘Others live at breakneck speed, but for me there is time — time for research, time for experience, time for life’. Teilah is happy to take all the time she needs.
I realised there was a part of me that was unfulfilled in the banking world. I enjoyed the technical and quantitative aspects of the job as well as the human
BRISBANE GIRLS GRAMMAR SCHOOL INSIGHTS 2015