Nancy Allen:  

I grew up to be a ballet dancer, studying at the best ballet school in the country, The School of American Ballet, which is the School attached to the New York City Ballet, during George Balanchine's heyday. It was also the era when the greatest Russian ballet dancers were defecting. They all came to the School to take class, including Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova. It was a unique time. I was very lucky to have been there then. The year before turning professional, I tore my ACL which ended my career before it really got going. I did have my fifteen minutes, though, as I spent two years in a regional ballet company in upstate New York, where I danced the lead in Sleeping Beauty. I then became a recording engineer at WBAI-fm, the listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio station, during the height of the Vietnam War. I worked for Bob Fass, the father of free-form radio, for four years, again during a truly unique time. All the famous and not-so-famous counter-culture people came to the station to be on his show, including many great musicians. I recorded them all and had a great time! I also spent two years as daytime engineer and like to tell people that I was responsible for the Women's Movement, as the women who came to the station to talk about women's rights wanted me, the "girl engineer", to record them and be their recording engineer when they went live on-the-air. I moved out of Manhattan to Westchester in the late seventies. Soon after moving, my first favorite cat got mauled by three dogs and because of the vet's indifference and my ignorance, he suffered for four months and died at the age of only seven years. That tragedy started me on the path that eventually led me to vet school. I went back to college (Pace University), which I hadn't finished the first time around, for biology, and graduated first in the class, but I wasn't accepted into the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell because i lacked the required animal-related experience. I then went to work as a lab tech for a protein biochemist at New York Medical College, which was my first exposure to the world of the medical school. I was completely fascinated and knew I'd finally found something to replace dancing, fifteen years after losing it. I realized very quickly that I didn't have enough of a chemistry background to pursue graduate work in life science, so, while working at New York Med., i went back to Pace and got another B.S., this time in chemistry, graduating second in the class. When the biochemist I was working for lost his grant and I lost the job, I went back to Pace again, this time in the Graduate Scool and got an M.S. in Computer Science. I worked as a LAN (local area network) administrator for four years, but it wasn't what I really cared about. Then, one day, I was riding around on ambulatory horse calls with a wonderful vet named Dr. Charles (Chick) Gandal, who'd been the Bronx Zoo vet for twenty years and spent the next thirty years visiting stables, diagnosing and treating people's horsies. He turned to me and said, "Would you quit screwin' around already and go to vet school - the animals need you, the clients need you". I realized he was right, this is what I was supposed to do, so ten years after my first application, I re-applied to Cornell and this time I got in. I packed up my eighteen cats and moved to Ithaca. I had the best time at Cornell! Of course, the program was grueling, but I loved it. This is what I was born to do. The professors were amazing. Not only are they great scientists, they're also great peo...Expand for more