Alessandra Colaianni, MD, is a graduate of Duke University, where she received degrees in biology and philosophy. She attended medical school at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and concurrently completed an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She’s currently a surgical resident at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. Although she maintains a busy schedule, one of the passions she keeps up with is her non-fiction writing. Her most recent piece about surgical residency, “Terra Nova,” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med. 2018; 379:1797-1799).
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December 2018ENTtoday: When did you first start writing?
AC: I would write little chapter books when I was a kid, in first or second grade. I took a couple of creative writing classes here and there, and in college I wrote a lot. I can be a very slow thinker, so sometimes it takes me writing about something to figure out how I feel about it. Growing up, writing was how I engaged with the world.