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She’s a doctor as at ease in the exam room as she is in the television studio. Deborah Gilboa, MD isn’t acting when she delivers spot-on expertise as the host of iQ: smartparent on WQED, but her on-screen charisma is rooted in her life before medicine at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama. “I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was about 6, but then I got to high school and I dissected a fetal pig. I got really grossed out, and I decided I couldn’t possibly be a doctor.” That quick decision led to a degree in Stage Management/Lighting Design followed by time volunteering as an EMT before she made a move to Chicago. In the six years after graduation, Gilboa got an incredible job: stage-managing for Second City, the improv and sketch comedy theater that launched the careers of everyone from Tina Fey to Stephen Colbert. “It was this amazing job,” she says, “and there was no next job to go try and get because I was kind of at the pinnacle of doing this unless I wanted to go to Broadway.” Though she was living a dream, she realized that maybe it wasn’t her own. “Once I settled into it and did it for a year, I realized that I could do it for three years or five years, but I did not want to do it for 30 like my predecessor.” She initially considered returning to her first job after college and becoming a paramedic, but her friends talked her out of it. “They said, you’d be a terrible paramedic because you’re always trying to change the system. You should go be a doctor.”
Gilboa had spent plenty of time dreaming of lab coats and stethoscopes, but the idea of returning to undergrad felt intimidatingly unrealistic. Despite her concerns, she called Northwestern’s Medical School. “I said, I want to apply to medical school, what are the requirements? And they said, Well, you have to have a bachelor’s. And I said, In what?, thinking they would say biology or some kind of science. And they said, In college.” She resigned from Second City after the next season and enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to get a few basic science requirements under her belt. Though she’d given up one of the most coveted jobs in the country, she found a new way to support herself when she studied American Sign Language and got certified as an interpreter. “Being an ASL interpreter actually kind of financially allowed me to spend that next year interviewing for medical school.” Ultimately, she enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “I took a pretty circuitous route,” she says, “and if there’s a message for college students, I think that you should do what you’re passionate about and excel in it…. Graduate schools look at where you graduated from and what honors you graduated with more than they look at what you studied. They get that young people in their early twenties change paths, so they just want to see that whatever it is you do, you really apply yourself and excel.”
The perfect example of her own advice, Gilboa rocked medical school and stood out in her residency. “My residency really encouraged a lot of leadership,” she says. “And not just leadership in the residency, but [for example] when I said, ‘Hey, there’s nobody in family medicine who’s lecturing about better healthcare for deaf and hard of hearing people—like nobody in the whole country—so I’d like to try and present at these conferences about this.’” With the support of her residency, she quickly blossomed into a strong public speaker and become the presenter of choice for group presentations. “I would say to my group mates, Hey, somebody else can have a turn, I don’t mean to hog all the spotlights. And they were like, No, we’d rather have a root canal without anesthesia than speak in front of a large group of people. And I’d come from theater, where people would throw their own grandmother under a bus to speak in front of a large group of people.” To this day, she credits CMU with giving her the experience necessary to cultivate her public persona, something she valued even more after her residency. “I learned two things: one of them is that not a lot of people do this, and the other is that even fewer do it well.”
With degrees in hand and years of experience under her belt, Gilboa settled into life as a family physician. She loves it, but she recognizes its limitations. “Most of the questions that I get asked in the office, though, are really parenting questions when it comes down to it. How do I get her to actually take that medicine? Well, I know he’s overweight, but how do I get him to turn off the TV?” Though her focus as a physician is directly on the health of each child, she realized that parents need care and support of their own. “I don’t ever want to give up seeing patients in the office, but what I realized is that I needed a different venue to try and answer the underlying questions that I was being asked.”
With that, she launched Ask Dr. G, a website that allows parents to ask questions in a secure environment, get advice, and access downloadable resources to guide them through everything from the terrible twos to the tricky teens. She authored two books, including Teach Resilience: Raising Kids Who Can Launch! and Teach Responsibility: Empower Kids with a Great Work Ethic. Her skill at speaking makes her an expert often contacted for magazine, newspaper and television interviews nationally. “Speaking is where I am most effective because of my background in Second City and I can use some humor, and because I have four kids of my own and I screw up with them all the time and I’m willing to talk about that.”
That’s right: four kids. How does she manage being a doctor, author, speaker, entrepreneur and parent? It’s complicated, she says, but not impossible. “I picked a life partner who really values always having somebody home with our kids, so he works 60% time and I work 40% time.” Both of them are physicians, but Gilboa says it was almost a more challenging arrangement for her husband. “He’s interviewing with the guy who’s the head of the emergency medicine group,” she begins, “and the guy says to him, Well, I don’t want to hire a guy who wants to work part-time. What the heck’s that about? …And my husband is a strong enough person to say, You know what? There are a lot of emergency medicine positions in this city and nobody else can teach my sons to be good men. That’s my job.”
Because of their commitment to a certain lifestyle, Gilboa and her husband created sustainable careers; she is realistic, though, that not everyone can do the same. “I hate to talk about it as ‘the answer,’ because it isn’t the only answer and also because it takes a lot of planning and a fair amount of luck to get there.” With that in mind, she encourages college women to stop worrying about balancing workplace ambition with a future family life. “In every lifetime, there are lots of situations. And if you try something and it’s not working for you or for your family, you think outside the box and find a way to change it.” After all, she’s proof; as she says, “I’m on my fourth career and I’m only 42.” And while Gilboa speaks from experience, she also encourages young women to find personal mentors to coach them. “Mentors that you trust, mentors you genuinely admire how they live their lives and the changes that they’ve made and the flexibility they’ve had in their lifetime.”
Now, Gilboa is taking on a large group of mentees of her own through the iQ: smartparent series. The first show, “Learning with Games,” premiered in February. “It’s one thing to say to parents, well, kids today are getting too much screen time. Like, okay, but what do I actually do? My kids want to play videogames. Which ones are okay? …We set out with this show to answer those kinds of practical questions for parents.” While this is the first time Gilboa is hosting a television show, the material is familiar. Combining medical knowledge with parenting experience, she hosted the “Girls Growing Up with Media” episode that aired in April and June’s “Health, Wellness and Technology.”
Not all college women are parents, but plenty work with young people. “iQ: smartparent is an opportunity for adults to think about how the kids in their lives are using technology and how we can encourage them not to avoid technology, but use technology to be savvy and healthy,” says Gilboa. “And so most college women have kids—whether they’re younger siblings or cousins or babysitting charges or kids they’re working with over the summer—they have kids in their life that they care about.” For some college women, parenting is an immediate reality; others aren’t sure that they’ll ever have kids. Either way, Gilboa says the key is to determine how the information they learn from watching the show can be put into practice within the month. “Because then,” she says, “the lessons will make a difference now, and they’ll stick for the women who are learning them. It will be easier to remember them someday in the future when they have kids of their own.” Of course, if memory fails you when you do have kids, there’s no reason to worry. Dr. G will be right there to support you along the way.
For more excellent advice from Deborah Gilboa, MD, visit her website, Ask Dr. G. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Through December 2013, HC Chatham is partnering with WQED to promote the iQ: smartparent series. Stay tuned for more interviews, giveaways, and behind-the-scenes excitement!
To stay up-to-date on iQ: smartparent news, like the WQED Edu Facebook page and visit wqed.org/smartparent to sign up for the newsletter and catch past episodes.
Headshot courtesy of Dr. Gilboa.
Photos from the set courtesy of WQED.