Anton Crepinsek '13 has heard his calling at Wabash—and in Nicaragua and Ecuador, in the labs and hospitals, and in the offices of his professors, mentors, and friends.
THIS IS the story of Anton Crepinsek.
The boy was 16 years old and had been home-schooled his whole life. In his middle school years, he started taking the same classes as his big sister, and his dad, the doctor, took days off to work with them on their scientific technique.
So when his big sister went off to college, the boy sat down to talk to his father, who gave him two choices: Go to the big public high school for two years or go to college.
While his mind was ready for college, his body wanted to run. He dreamed of becoming a big-time distance runner who would wow the major college recruiters with his feet, not his mind. He went to the big public high school. He didn’t need to study. He ran. He fell in love. He had a good time.
Then the young man had to decide where to go to college. He could pursue biomedical engineering at Purdue. Or, to satisfy the old man, he could take a look at the little liberal arts college in Crawfords-ville where his father’s physician partners went to school.
HE VISITED WABASH and told his mother he wouldn’t go there: “Too quiet, too dead, nobody around.”
Then came the injury in his senior year and the dreams of the D-1 running scholarship vanished. Busch, the Wabash coach, called one night and spoke the truth to the kid who had been coasting since home school: “If you are serious about running, if you are serious about science, come to Wabash and you can go as far as you want to go.”
Begrudgingly, the young man attended Honor Scholarship Weekend and because he was a math and science whiz-kid, he aced the exam, won the top award, and sent in his $250 deposit. A week later, a scholarship offer from a D-I program came, but he remembered the words of his future coach: “You can go as far as you want to go.”
He went from being “a big fish in a pretty big pond” at the big public high school to, haltingly, “a small fish in a really small pond at Wabash.” There were brilliant students—O’Donnell, Drake, and Coggins. There were the All-American runners—Einterz, McCarthy, and Waterman. He was overwhelmed and missed his home. He didn’t think he could cut it at Wabash,
didn’t think he belonged. He survived his first fall.
In March he got the call that no young man wants to get: “Your father’s in the hospital.” The doctor who had only ever been beside the hospital bed was now in it. A radiologist missed the obstruction on the MRI, but the surgeon caught the mistake. The surgeon sensed the young man’s fear and pulled him aside. His calm manner and the precision of his words were a turning point in the young man’s life: “Not only could I understand what the surgeon was going to do to my father, I could see the surgeon working hard to understand my fears. That’s why he will always be a hero to me.”
The young man loaded up with pre-med classes. He began to notice how smart, how driven all the other pre-med guys were, and he began to feel the intense academic pressure to excel. Then he failed.
It was the second-semester organic chemistry course with the infamous Professor Olsen, famous for rooting out the students not smart enough or not willing to work hard enough to cut med school. The exam score was 57, but it might as well have been a zero. Olsen, who has tracked the success and failure of a generation of organic chemistry students, handed him data—data that never lies—that showed it would be nearly impossible to pass the class.
Then, because he was a student senator, he attended a meeting of the faculty’s Aca-demic Policy Committee and heard Dean Phillips say this: “At Wabash, we want every student to fail at least once. We want them to fail so that they can learn to pick themselves up and get better and stronger.”
HAVING EXPERIENCED FAILURE for the very first time in his 20-year-old life, the young man did what the Dean said all Wabash students must learn to do: He picked himself up. He went to the infamous organic professor, who told him he needed to ace the final to have a prayer. He aced the final. He got an A-minus in the class.
HE BEGAN TO SOAR. He took a medical mission trip to Nicaragua over spring break. He spent a month in Ecuador meeting the locals, eating new foods, and walk-ing the beaches of a tiny fishing village that faces the “poor man’s Galapagos.” He walked high atop the canopy in the rainforest, where he was warned to avoid the potent sting of the bullet ant. When he told his teachers that he wanted to know what it would be like, one teacher said, “It’s a good sign that you want to know what it would be like—means you’ll be a good scientist.” Then the professor told him not to let the bullet ant sting him.
The professors he traveled, laughed, learned, dined, walked, and ached with—Hardy, Porter, Rogers, McColgin—became his mentors. He got to know his faculty differently. He was inspired.
That summer he returned to campus to conduct research that will one day allow tiny microchips to deliver medicines within the body. He traveled to San Diego to present the research. He began to develop confidence. He came to realize that he could cut Wabash; that he could be as great as the great scientists he admired his freshman year; that he could go as far as he wanted to go.
He would need that confidence in his junior year: Three lab sciences in a single semester and a 400-level English course. Dallinger and the intricate, detailed work of analytical chemistry made him focus. Lamberton and the writing course helped him release the stress of the lab work and become more introspective.
But the young scientist failed again. The Pre-Med advisor began giving practice exams for the Medical College Admissions Test and he scored only a 23. He was told it was nearly impossible to improve by more than five points. He remembered a conversation with his father at the dinner table earlier in the year when he realized for the first time that “physicians don’t have the luxury of not getting 4.0 GPAs; they have to get a 4.0 each and every day or someone dies.”
He dug in and worked hard. That May, for the first time at Wabash, he scored a perfect 4.0, and he studied for the MCAT for six, seven, eight hours a day for three weeks. When he took the test he scored a 34, putting the Wabash man in the 94th percentile of every single student who wanted to go to medical school as badly as he did.
That summer before his senior year he interned at a hospital in South Bend with a scientist trying to discover how traumatic brain injuries affect the way blood cells clot. The young man’s job was to fact-check the statistical values of the project, but there didn’t seem to be much point, as the paper had already been accepted for publication in the journal Neurocritical Care. Still, the statistics in the research paper didn’t make sense to the young man trained by Dallinger’s dogged “attention to detail” lectures. So he went to the project leader and said, “Wait a minute.” The project leader took a look, laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Thank you. You just saved us from public embarrassment in a major medical journal.”
Feeling his confidence and soaring from his 34 on the MCAT and his work on por-ous silicon microchips in the lab and from his stunning discovery in the near-fiasco blood-clotting project, he applied to the loftiest of medical schools. And he planned his marriage to Bailey, the high-school sweetheart, for the following summer.
THROUGH THE FALL of his final semester at Wabash, he was rejected by all of the big name schools, and he was disappointed because having a big name on his medical degree really mattered to him.
So he had to decide whether he would go to Indiana, even though the name “Indi-ana” on his medical degree made him feel as though he was not good enough to succeed. And then came another conversation with a professor, Novak, whose ad-vice reminded him of the Wabash coach he’d listened to when he decided to come to Wabash: “You can go as far as you want to go at IU. When you save someone’s life, they will not care where you went to medical school.”
And once again he saw medicine as a beautiful calling and that the only way he would fail was if he did not use his own life to save others. The pre-med advisor who had coached him from the dismal 23 to the 94th percentile on the MCAT spoke the words that ring most clearly to him today: “A normal day in the life of a doctor is almost always a life-changing day for the patient.”
His last act on the Wabash campus came in early January when he received distinction on his comprehensive exams in chemistry.
NOW THE WABASH ALUMNUS has rented an apartment in Lafayette, where he will live with his bride and they will make their home while she finishes her degree at Purdue and he begins medical school in August at the IU campus in West Lafayette. He needs a job for six months, but no one will hire him—not to do work in the research park, or even to mop floors at the nearby hospital.
So he decides to substitute teach. And he gets a call from the principal at Happy Hollow Elementary School, but his only student is not happy. He is 11 and he has beaten up boys and girls. He says he knows how to make an acid bomb. He uses the Happy Hollow computers to read about Columbine. The State says the boy must be in school and the principal says the boy cannot be around other students. So the soon-to-be medical student spends six weeks with the boy, whose father is in prison and whose mother is unemployed and who doesn’t get to eat when the food stamps run out.
The Wabash man recalls his conversations with his father at the dinner table and with Novak, Dallinger, and Porter in the Hays Hall labs, and with Rogers and Hardy in the rain forest, and with Olofson, the child psychologist who teaches a fatherhood class at Wabash. And he tells the troubled boy: “I have decided to devote my entire life to helping other people and that’s what I am trying to do with you. You do not intimidate me.”
Together they learn about Dr. Ben Carson, once a violent, troubled child but who went on to become a renowned neurosurgeon and whose life is the story of the movie Gifted Hands. And the boy can see himself in the Gifted Hands doctor and the boy looks up at his teacher and says, “I’m going to write that doctor an email.”
THROUGH TEARS BOTH TEACHER and troubled child realize there has been a turning point; progress has been made. The boy is learning how to pick himself up and work harder and be stronger.
Five days later, the boy and his mother, each with a single suitcase, board a Greyhound bus for South Dakota, and the Wabash man is once again devastated.
But this time he is not overwhelmed. Even in his frustration, he begins to see his future taking shape. His empathy and his love for children and his desire to give himself to others have him researching pediatric surgery as a potential career path. His father, the doctor, tells him: “If you want to operate on babies, you have to understand that you will see a lot of babies die.”
And he thinks about that long and hard: He imagines his wedding day this spring and he sees Bailey having their babies as he is working through medical school and residencies and fellowships in pediatric surgery. And he is emboldened by the notion that his own experiences as a father might help him better understand the fears of parents whose own babies will lie on his operating table.
WHILE HIS CLASSMATES toil through the spring semester before graduation, the young man reflects about how much he has changed since he was 16 years old and chose to spend two years in high school to become a D-I distance runner. Through the encouragement of his professors, he now understands that he was meant to be at this college. And while reluctant to use a word like “transformation,” he has heard his calling at Wabash —and in Nicaragua and Ecuador, in the labs and hospitals, and in the offices of his professors, mentors, and friends: “I’m so much more passionate after my experience here, and I want to contribute to something that will make a difference in people’s lives.”
And he will.