When Alexandra Mandel got an email announcing that she’d been accepted to the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Early Selection Program in 2017, there was just one person she wanted to tell after her family: her best friend and roommate, Sarah Schmitt. The two had lived together since their first year in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences’ Women’s Leadership Program (WLP) and shared everything, including aspirations for a medical career.
They’d both applied to the program but hadn’t talked much about the application process, not wanting to jinx the possibility that they could do this together, too. But Mandel was in Washington, D.C., for a summer internship, and Schmitt was home in San Francisco. Schmitt was the first to text: Have you checked your email?
“We probably danced around it for 10 minutes,” Mandel said, laughing. “‘Oh, have you checked your email lately?’ ‘Oh, me too.’ ‘I got an email.’ ‘Hmm, me too.’” Finally, sick with the suspense of watching the dots of Schmitt’s incoming text, Mandel burst out with it: “I got in.” This time, Schmitt responded quickly. She’d gotten in, too.
“Then we just started screaming and called each other,” Mandel said.
It would be the next in a series of shared adventures for Mandel and Schmitt, who first lived together for a few days in 2015 before their first year of college even began. They were assigned roommates at a GW new-student orientation, and while they don’t exactly remember their first impressions of each other, they both remember the relief of meeting someone they knew they’d get along with. Both were pre-med students and bonded over a mutual love of travel.
“I probably thought Sarah was cool just because she was from San Francisco,” said Mandel, a native of Rockville, Md.
“I was really excited to meet someone else in the WLP,” Schmitt said. “It was just nice to know someone I could really talk to—somebody that I’d actually get to see more often in college.”
Schmitt and Mandel wouldn’t just see each other more often. They’d choose to live together for the next eight years—an arrangement that will change after Commencement on the National Mall May 21, when they’ll receive their medical degrees and mark the beginning of a new adventure.
During their first year as suitemates on the Mount Vernon Campus, they found an easy rapport living together, working together and exploring D.C. During the “Snowzilla” blizzard in January 2016, they got so desperate for non-cafeteria food that they trekked together to Georgetown through hip-deep drifts of snow.
Because both were hardworking pre-med students studying public health, they also had plenty of shared classes. “There were definitely a lot of moments of pain and suffering in the library together,” Schmitt said. With a third friend, they even started a GW chapter of She’s the First, a nonprofit supporting female scholars from low-income countries who are the first in their families to graduate high school. The organization is still going strong.
The duo chose the same program for study abroad their junior year, a semester-long health and society course at King’s College London. That semester they finally took a break from cohabitation—technically. They lived across the street from each other, in the same apartment complex.
“We couldn’t be that far apart,” Mandel said.
They came to appreciate their differences as well as their similarities. Mandel said she appreciates Schmitt’s laser focus and tenacity, while Schmitt admires Mandel’s creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. They traveled together frequently: to Scandinavia in winter, to Italy in spring. They saw “Funny Girl” on Broadway. They stayed with each other’s families, who also grew close. And they entered medical school together in 2019, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both said they felt relatively lucky their medical education fell where it did, giving them a semester and a half of “normal” class experience and a solid medical school friend group that could organize outdoor gatherings during social distancing.
“The class above us was going into their rotations, so they were on the front lines or their experiences were canceled or abbreviated, and then the class after us came in with the full-blown pandemic so they didn't really get an opportunity to meet other people the same way our class did,” Mandel said. “Obviously I don't think there was anything particularly lucky about the pandemic, but I think in terms of where we fell, we were fortunate.”
Their focuses diverged in medical school, though their living situation did not. Schmitt, originally interested in obstetrics and gynecology, ended up falling in love with pediatrics. Mandel, formerly a pre-professional dancer, followed her longstanding interest in movement disorders and will focus on neuroscience. Both consider WLP Director Carly Jordan a lifelong mentor—“We owe everything to her,” Schmitt said—and they’ve returned to the WLP multiple times in the past year to facilitate discussions on health policy with first-year students. The visits reminded them what a difference eight years can make.
“It was really full circle to be back there as a presenter rather than as a student, but it’s crazy to think how young we were,” Schmitt said.
Now, with residency approaching, they’ll try something they’ve never done as adults: living apart. Their apartment in D.C. is full of Schmitt’s neatly stacked boxes, ready for her upcoming move to join New York University’s pediatric residency program. Mandel will enter a residency in adult neurology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. This will all come after Commencement and, of course, a joint graduation party with their families.
Both are excited, but also a little apprehensive about this next step. It's hard to imagine not having their full-time companion and cheerleader nearby through every difficulty.
“We’ve shared every experience for the past eight years,” Schmitt said. “I think having different experiences is going to be amazing, but also just weird.”
“We’ll still be there for each other when we head off on these new paths, like I'm going to go visit her in New York, and I hope she comes to visit me in Michigan,” Mandel said. “Many long phone and Facetime calls to see how things are going.”
