ABSTRACT
I was now twenty-eight years old. I had been a student all my life. My psychiatric training was coming to an end at Rochester, but the idea of having a regular job, let alone a career, was still new to me. It evoked all of the uncertainties about who I was and who I wanted to become. My immediate concern following the end my residency was the coming year. But it was hard to think about that without looking beyond to long-term career prospects. My fellow residents had a clearer sense of where they wanted to work and live. I remember Cy Worby talking about a place called Stanford in glowing terms. An excellent university with a fine medical school, it was located in Palo Alto, close to San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. It had delightful weather in a bucolic setting of fruit orchards. However, it was out of his reach. This was the first time I had heard of Stanford, and it sounded as if it certainly would be beyond my reach as well. Besides, the West Coast was so far away that it seemed like the end of the earth.
