Choosing a New Path: Alexander Droznin-Izrael ’11, from Slavic Language Scholar to Medical Student
By Becca Gillis
Some people end up in postgraduate programs because they’re following a clear, standard path, destined for, say, med school from that freshman-year Anatomy 101 class. Alexander Droznin-Izrael ’11, however, landed in his for quite the opposite reason. “Everyone knew I was a pre-med, but it seemed like all my friends were on that path” he says. “I liked the idea of pursuing something non-standard.”
Having majored in Russian in addition to biology, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard. But as much as he enjoyed the subject material and his work teaching undergraduates, he couldn’t shake the feeling that a lifetime in that field would feel disconnected from much of the world, and medicine crept into his thoughts again. “Looking at my background, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, do I want to teach ten college students a year, or do I want to see hundreds or thousands of patients a year and help them get better?’” he says. “I felt that I could make a greater difference in medicine.”
Still, academia would retain Alexander for two more years as COVID pummeled the world and its hospitals, making it difficult for him to acquire the clinical experience necessary to apply to medical school. He exited his Ph.D. program in 2022, prior to completing his dissertation but having secured a master’s degree and a plethora of teaching experience.
Now, after two years in clinical research, Alexander is in the midst of his first year of medical school, which he describes as “both fascinating and like drinking out of a fire hose.” Despite the long hours and the host of minute details and complex systems to commit to memory, his excitement about the dawn of his medical career—and the change he may effect with it—is palpable. Alexander has a few years yet to determine his specialty (or to decide not to specialize), but he keeps returning to oncology, an area of medical advancement he likens to HIV research in the 1990s in its potential to transform a death sentence into a manageable illness. “So much of [medicine] is about alleviating suffering,” he says. “How wonderful is it to be part of a community that's tasked with reducing suffering? That, to me, is a blessing in this work.”
Alexander may be about six years older than most of the students in his classes, but he says he has no regrets about his detour to grad school, as he values the life experience gained over those years and the opportunity to think in different ways, especially through teaching. He’s discovered his time spent immersed in humanities work not only solidified his writing skills, but also taught him how to apply close-reading practices to his medical studies: “When you read closely, you don't want to lose sight of the whole thing. And I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing here, too; yes, I'm understanding how individual molecules and proteins are working in a given mechanism, but I'm also trying to keep a broader sense of how that connects to the bigger picture of health and all of the social determinants that are related to a patient's health.”
Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth School. This originally appeared as part of an article in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.