1976
Mark Litzow
I graduated from Carleton in 1976 and went to medical school at the University of Chicago from ’76 to ’80. After that I did residency and fellowship at the Mayo Clinic. I also spent a year of special training in blood and marrow transplantation at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from ’89 to ’90.
I am currently a hematologist at the Mayo Clinic specializing in the treatment of acute leukemia and in the use of blood and marrow transplantation. In 1985 I lived in Africa for a year and did medical relief work with Ethiopian refugees in the Sudan. I traveled to Russia in 1988 with a group of high school students for a week, but haven’t honestly done much with my Russian otherwise since college.
Randy Steinman
I graduated in 1976 with a major in Russian Studies, spending most of my time with profs Joe Shephard, Bill Woehrlein, and Dave Chandler. I was lucky enough to have spent the summer of 1974 at lgu in Leningrad. Coincidentally, both myself, and the other Russian Studies major, Mark Litzow, ended up in medicine.
I practice emergency medicine in Minneapolis with a large, 110 doctor group. Occasionally, I care for older Russian émigrés who speak little English and surprise them when I ask them questions in Russian! If only heart, lung, and stomach ailments had been part of our daily dialogue!
My other recent use of Russian came when I visited Israel in 2004 for my nephew’s bar mitzvah; over 600000 Russians have moved there, to the point that some areas speak more Russian than Hebrew. Many of the road and store signs were in Russian. My son and I had a great conversation with some teenage Russian hitchhikers I picked up one day.