Craig Clifford

Craig Clifford, M.D., who graduated from UIC with a double major in Latin and Chemistry will be returning to UIC in fall 09 to pursue a PhD in Chemistry.

I wish I could tell you how clever I am, or how I knew from the start that I was destined to be successful in entering the medical profession. Yet the fact of the matter is I had none of those advantages. I attribute a large measure of my success to the course of study that I ended up pursuing at UIC as an undergraduate. I started at UIC as a biology major. I was the first in my family to attend college, and as a freshman, I had no clear idea about what course of study I wanted to pursue. I lacked focus and polish. In my classes, I often mispronounced words that I had never encountered before and struggled with mastering unfamiliar proper names, especially those of ancient Greek and Roman writers. To satisfy UIC’s two-year foreign language requirement, I chose to study Latin for no other reason than because I had taken it in high school. What very quickly became clear to me was that in studying Latin, and later ancient Greek and Classical literature, I was not just going through the motions of obtaining a college degree and sitting through lectures that held no interest or excitement. Instead, my Classics professors did much more that simply teach me the content of a given course; they gave me the benefit of a solid education, one that prepared me to go out into the world and succeed at whatever I put my hand to. As far as scholarship and learning go, who will deny that Classics professors are some of the most gifted. I learned how to speak, how to read, how to think critically thanks to a close study of ancient thinkers channeled through modern interpretation. In classes of thirty students and sometimes fewer, which is the norm in Classics, each student receives individual attention. Interaction with the faculty is made possible by the favorable student to teacher ratio. Drawing on their own life experience, and through apt analogies, the faculty instill in their students more than just superficial knowledge of a foreign language.

The confidence I gained through interacting with scholars at a high level encouraged me to apply to medical school. What I discovered in my post-graduate studies is that graduating with a major in Classics produces a certain "WOW" reaction. During my interviews with medical schools, I always received the same response from my interviewers when they learned of my studies in Greek and Latin; they were genuinely impressed. It is largely on account of my Classics background that I not only gained admission to medical school at Rush University Medical Center, but also was successful four years later in attaining a much sought after Transitional year for my internship at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles California. Again, the topic that rose to the surface in the interview with my internship advisor was my Classics background. Then later still, during the course of my interview for a position in a residency program, the Head of the Pathology Department head at Brown University, where I was offered and accepted a position, was very favorably impressed with my Classics degree. He went on at great length about the benefits he had derived from his own Latin studies in his youth.

The one constant in all the sundry interviews in which I took part was that all of my competitors were bright, ambitious pre-med students or, later, fellow physicians.  What tended to give me an edge over this stiff competition and set me apart from the rest was my Classics degree, which demonstrated intellectual curiosity on my part  beyond the field of medicine and a willingness to pursue a rigorous and very rewarding course of study.

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