EPISODE 19: STEPHANIE SCHULMAN

Interview by Justin Nathan

May 6, 2020

After graduating from college, I worked in New York for the year as a care coordinator at a fertility clinic. It was honestly really sick, though it may have turned me off of an OB/GYN residency, truth be told. I had spent a lot of time in college doing research and volunteering in women’s health and related fields, so it felt like it would be an easy transition post-grad. I had never really dreamed of living in New York, but I had a friend I could live with and my long-time boyfriend, Josh, lived there too.
 
However, during that year after graduating, I found myself really struggling with the anxiety of living on my own in this new environment. Sometimes, I literally couldn’t sleep. Sometimes, I felt like I was going to throw up just trying to get to work in the morning. Everything in the city was so fast and I felt like I had to have plans every night. That truly was something I was not used to. I think everyone has a weird transition right out of college, but that, in combination with not having my family support, was really hard.
 
My family is super close to one another. I grew up within 10 minutes from all my grandparents, all my cousins, and I have two younger brothers that I’m really close to. I grew up 30 minutes from Detroit – everyone in Michigan does this annoying thing where you like hold your hand and point to where you’re from…I’m by the base of your thumb. Anyway, no one’s ever lived out of the state in my whole family for three generations back. Everybody is just born and raised in Michigan. So, when I decided to move to New York last year, it was a pretty big deal and my family just didn’t really understand why I wanted to. In some ways, I felt like there wasn’t enough in Michigan for me anymore. I wanted to broaden my horizons.
 
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely see the value of living there. It is quiet, which I like, and there’s enough space to run around in your own backyard. The suburb I grew up isn’t that small relatively, but it’s got that small-town feel. It’s even more so because I grew up in the only Jewish area in basically all of Michigan, so my best friends and I all went to a tiny Jewish private school that went from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Despite the fact that I switched schools for high school (my class was literally too small and basically disappeared), my friends and I all grew up kind of similarly in this modern Orthodox community where we would go over to someone’s house for Shabbat and just like stay there with their family for 25 hours. Because it was Shabbat, friendships formed without any distractions. My friends back home and I grew up as basically part of each other’s families, so we know everything about each other. You’re not going to watch TV and you’re just really going to understand each other. I think I’m a really introspective person and maybe that experience shaped me to be that way. Where I grew up in Michigan was by nature, kind of just slower paced.
 
So, when I moved to New York, it was probably the hardest thing I have ever done. I fought my family so hard just to move there, but I still cried the entire drive. If I were to have a family some day in Michigan, I would probably live in the same area – the only Jewish area – and I would I feel like I was just repeating my life. To me, that’s so hard to think about.
 
My relationship with my family changed a lot through all of this, especially when I chose to go to school in New York, but it was a very big growing moment for me. I learned more about how to communicate, not just with them, but also with myself and with the people in my life. So, I’m not trying to hide that I dealt with anxiety all last year. I think when people see me, they think, “Oh Steph, she’s nice, a good person, kind of funny,” but people who really understand me would also say that I’m pretty determined and that I’m pretty resilient. I know anxiety is something that a lot of people struggle with and, for me, I’ve found the more you try to speak about things, the better it gets.

It’s like I always say: I would much rather be understood than loved, if I had to choose one. To me, that’s the highest level of friendship.

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists on Spotify? 
Hozier, Kacey Musgraves, Lord Huron, the Staves, and AJR

If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?
Teleportation. I could save so much time going anywhere I could imagine. Like, “Oh yes, I am at the Northern Lights and now I’m at the pyramids.”

Pick something or someone from NYMC to give a shout-out to!
Shout out to true friendship and shout out to the good part of the library and the breaded chicken sandwiches that I don’t get anymore because I’m not at school.

If someone wants to talk to you, they should lead with:
Probably a self-deprecating comment because I feel like I do that to myself and I think it’s funny.