Alumni Profiles

B.S., double major, biology and chemistry, 2004
The Brody School of Medicine

East Carolina University

Greenville, N.C.

Sometimes scholars are athletes. Some athletes do well in classes. Listen to this: AJ Robertson is what you might call an uberjock, a super athlete. She was an award-winning athlete in two sports at Guilford (All-Conference in one), and in her four years of athletic competition, she also managed to make all A’s in her classes. All of her classes, all four years.

“Well, I did get two A minuses,” she says modestly. In what? “One was in Honors Accelerated Calculus and the other was in Physics.” Like all outstanding athletes, she is definitely competitive … and she probably will remember those two A minuses for the rest of her life. Without smiling nostalgically.

A tall and graceful young woman, AJ led the way in Guilford athletics as captain of her volleyball team and as holder of many records in basketball, including the career record for most three-pointers made and attempted. She was the recipient of Guilford’s 2003 Nereus C. English Athletic Leadership Award, the school’s highest athletic honor, and she was the inaugural ODAC (conference) Women’s Basketball Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

This woman can play, and she now has turned her formidable strength, focus, dedication and competitiveness to helping others. “I knew I wanted to become a doctor,” she says, “and at Guilford I had the grades, I had the ambition — I decided to go whole hog and enter med school.”

AJ had a good idea what she was getting into. Her mother is a nurse, and AJ herself had spent most of one summer in a relationship that was crucial. “My advisor matched me with a doctor who was the head of Pediatrics at UNC, who was working at Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro,” she says. “I spent the summer before my sophomore year at Guilford working with him.”

That sealed the deal. “It was amazing. I made his rounds with him, I spent all kinds of time with the kids [patients in the Pediatrics unit], and at the end of that experience, I knew I wanted to be a doctor.”

AJ went on to complete an internship with GlaxoSmithKline in the HIV clinical research department. Never one to be bothered by spare time, she also served in Guilford’s Young Alumni Leadership Program and was a volunteer for the American Heart Association … in addition to her two sports, her internships and her straight-A academic work.

“I love the study of pathology,” she says. “Diseases and their treatment are like puzzles, a real mental challenge to figure out. They’re like jigsaw puzzles, and they definitely bring out my competitive spirit.”

How did Guilford prepare her for her grueling, demanding life as a medical student? “Oh my gosh,” she says, “Guilford was terrific. I developed some real and important personal relationships with the professors there. They worked with us to ensure that we could achieve in athletics as well as in the classroom.”

She adds: “Our advisors and professors went to the games, and even to a lot of the practices, to show their support. Talk about athletics being embraced by a faculty and staff. That was Guilford.”

The medical school at ECU has a fine reputation. In the 2006 U.S. News and World Report medical school rankings, it was ranked 6th in the nation in primary care, tied with Duke University, the University of Colorado at Denver and the University of Wisconsin. The school also is ranked 7th in rural medicine and 9th in family medicine.

Did Guilford prepare her well for the academic demands of medical school? “Most definitely,” she says. “For instance, my anatomy class at Guilford was as good — and as challenging — as the anatomy class here in med school.”

She adds: “Just as important is how Guilford opened my eyes to different lifestyles, to different cultures. Believe me, this already has been crucial in helping me relate to all kinds of patients in nonjudgmental ways. I am so grateful for my years at Guilford.”

Here’s how she sums up her experiences at the college: “At Guilford you can do it all — you can manage to accomplish everything you want to do! In my case that meant athletics, academics, community service, various clubs. And the reason you can do it is that the whole college supports you. They make it possible.”