When Mr. Carl Craft nearly died from a brain hemorrhage, he and his wife Dawn reviewed their bucket list. Carl wanted to travel, Dawn said she wanted to go to medical school.
“He thought I was crazy,” she said.
Now though, Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft proudly carries a doctorate in medicine after finishing as the school’s oldest-ever graduate at 72 years old.
The doctoral dream took root from the earliest periods of Zuidgeest-Craft’s life, and would blossom into a career as a nurse practitioner and pediatric educator. It was a career she enjoyed even while marrying and giving birth to two children.
For the sake of them, Zuidgeest-Craft put her medical school ambition on hold—at least until her 40s, she thought. Then she got divorced and remarried before she and her new husband—Carl—decided to start their own family. Zuidgeest-Craft spent the decade raising two more children.
The dream of medical school gradually faded until Carl suffered his brain hemorrhage, at which point Dawn realized it had to happen now, or, as the phrase goes, never.
Digging into her retirement savings, Zuidgeest-Craft paid the tuition for St. James School of Medicine in Anguilla, the Caribbean, where the institution waives the requirement for a Medical College Admission Test.
It wasn’t a straightforward process, and the senior scholar wouldn’t have hoped or imagined failing the biochemistry exam during year 1, but with the support of her husband Carl and the classmates who all remember her fondly from their dorm living, movie nights, and yoga sessions on the beach, Zuidgeest-Craft kept going.
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It took clinical rotations in Chicago and West Virginia, and a stint in South Texas where a medical professional encouraged her—based on aptitude—to seek out a residency program, for Zuidgeest-Craft to graduate with her doctorate this month, not long in advance of her 73rd Birthday.
“When you have to do it for work… you feel like, ‘I got to do this so that I can pay my rent,’” Zuidgeest-Craft, who has three grandchildren, told the Washington Post. “I want to do this because I really enjoy this.”
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“I feel alive when I work in the medical field.”
She will begin her residency at Trinity Health Medical Center in Muskegon, Michigan this year.
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