You may remember Nikhil Teja as your friendly senior class officer. Or if you were more into athletics than high school politics, you might instead remember him as the the captain of the Whitman hockey team or the president of the rock climbing club. Or perhaps you recall his work with the Young Democrats (or the Amnesty International club. Or Whitman's award-winning Model UN team). Or maybe it's just that you can still hear his voice reading the morning announcements... Point is, if you were at Whitman in 2003, chances are you crossed paths with Nikhil, our senior class officer who somehow found time to do it all.
Which is why it may come as no surprise that Nikhil left Whitman and continued to conquer the world. After graduating high school, Nikhil earned his undergraduate degree in economics from the prestigious London School of Economics and went on to do graduate work in economics at Georgetown. After a career in finance, he began yet another (successful) career in audio engineering before going back to school... to become a doctor. Because if there's one thing we've learned about Nikhil, it's that there's apparently nothing he can't do. Nikhil (or should I say Dr. Teja?) completed his post-baccalaureate premedical training at the University of Maryland, earned his medical degree from Tulane University, and went on to complete a general psychiatry residency an addiction psychiatry fellowship at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. And throughout that time, Nikhil earned countless awards and prestigious scholarships and lived on three continents.
[Editor's note: In addition to being possibly the world's greatest overachiever, he's also annoyingly humble - I had to pull almost all of this from his professional bio online because he refuses to brag about himself]
Question: What was your favorite part about high school?
Answer: My friends.
Question: Least favorite part of high school?
Answer: My enemies.
Question: Any secret confessions from your WWHS days?
Answer: I hated pep rallies.
[Editor's note: you may or may not recall that your senior class officers, Liz, Nikhil, and Alex, were tasked with emceeing our pep rallies... with various levels of enthusiasm].
These days, Nikhil has settled stateside in Reno, NV, where he works as an addiction psychiatrist, a career he was perhaps destined for, but he says he never could imagined back in his Whitman days. He and his wife, Melissa have a one-year-old, Leonidas, and two Shih Tzus named Bernoulli and Fibonacci. And true to form, practicing medicine and being a dad isn't all Nikhil manages to fit into his busy days; he still plays ice hockey and is a certified kettlebell, macebell, and clubbell instructor.
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