Applicants and patients alike, welcome! I’m Joseph Pepitone, and I’m from Orlando, Florida. My road to medicine was not a direct one. I completed my undergraduate degree at Florida State University in applied mathematics. Immediately thereafter, I began my graduate study in theoretical chemistry at The University of Chicago, where I did research on designing computer simulations of proteins and molecules to be more efficient. At some point through my graduate study, I realized something fundamentally important to my own happiness was missing: human interaction! It was with this in mind that I left my graduate program with my masters having the realization that medicine, and psychiatry in particular, would give me the human component I needed. I chose psychiatry because I view the field as the final frontier of medicine, and I find it infinitely fascinating. It’s a field where we’re still learning more every year about the fundamental pathophysiology of conditions we treat every day. (E.g. knowing childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for psychiatric illness for decades, but only recently learning how that translates into brain structure and development, causing a predisposition to psychiatric illness.)
When choosing an appropriate residency program, it’s important to consider the environment you will be training in, both the city and the institution, the types of education opportunities available to trainees, the culture of your department, and the people you will be training with. I ranked UVM as #1 on my rank list because it struck the perfect balance on all of these domains for me.