# @washu on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp5-7xTPmen
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/4876425-washu-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/81469c61d0.jpg
- **Posted:** 2023-03-17T21:59:16.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** WashU (@washu) — https://gondola.cc/washu

## Caption

Today our graduating washumedicine students and thousands of medical students across the country learned where they will continue their journey to become licensed physicians. Match Day is a moment some medical students have spent their entire lives preparing for and working towards.

As a former patient of the Cleft and Craniofacial Surgery team at St. Louis Children's hospital, it is a full circle moment for Kristin D. Pfeifauf, JD. Kristin has had nearly 20 procedures in her lifetime, and in that process, she experienced what it means to be taken care of by a team of providers showing up for you as a patient every day.

While she has always gravitated to medicine, her path to becoming a doctor has been unique. She is an attorney, and she graduated from the School of Law. Post Law School, she took a brief job as in-house counsel at a chain of nursing homes. In this role, she was reading a lot of medical records and remembered wishing she was wrote said records instead of reading them. Between idolizing her surgeons on the Cleft and Craniofacial Surgery team, attending a medical camp at Berkley in high school, and volunteering at clinics, this further planted the seed.

Kristin has always believed the best thing you can be is a doctor but didn't aspire to be that because she didn't think she had what it took. But her time, hard work, and dedication proved otherwise.

"The pressure people feel in their 20s that they're going to make a wrong decision and waste time is not the most helpful way to think about decision-making in life. It's been a great experience coming through this process, and I am showing myself that not only can I do this, but the version of me that can do this required all the things that came before to make this possible. So I have a lot of gratitude for the misteps and the longer journey that I had to get to medical school."

The journey continues at University of Florida College of Medicine – Jacksonville, where she matched into Emergency Medicine.

#FacesofWashU #WashU #WUSTL #matchday

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## Tags

washu, wustl, matchday, facesofwashu

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