Becoming a doctor/lawyer at the same time: UF's Kimi Swartz seeks concurrent dual degrees in medicine and law.

When Kimi Swartz was a preschooler, she had to dress up for graduation, so she borrowed her dietician mom's white coat. Even before kindergarten, she pretended to be a doctor and she's never changed her mind.

When Swartz was 14, she was in the car with her dad, who tuned in National Public Radio. The topic of this day's on-air dialog was the controversial end-of-life case of Terry Schiavo and the Florida governor's and Legislature's attempts to block her husband from removing life support, even though the woman was in a persistent vegetative state. Her dad asked her what she thought about it all, and Swartz said she couldn't understand how politicians without medical degrees were making personal decisions about a patient's care. During that car ride, she thought: "They needed a doctor in their midst, and one day that will be me."

When she was a junior in high school, she seriously considered her dad's earlier suggestion when she was in the fifth grade that she become both a doctor and a lawyer. As a fifth-grader, she thought his suggestion was "crazy." Now, as a high-schooler, she agreed to give it a shot.

That's how Swartz, of Weston, became the one and only University of Florida student seeking concurrent dual degrees in medicine and law in its formal MD-JD program. In May, she graduated from law school, with grades that ranked her 25th out of 330 students in her class for the spring semester.

Impressive for a 27-year-old student who is currently an intern at UF Health Shands Children's Hospital, where she endures 13-and-a-half-hour days doing pediatric rotations six days a week.

"I see patients and wake them up at 6 a.m. I poke and prod them and hopefully make them feel better," Swartz said. "I inhale coffee at the hospital. I get home at 7:30 p.m. and heat up leftovers and go to sleep. I think it's inhumane!"

But she keeps her eye on the prize: a career involving public policy and medical ethics, perhaps at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"I started all this because I love patients and care about patients," she said, adding she hopes to keep hands-on experience working at a clinic. But at the same time, she wants to "help patients out with a large-scale effort. I won't be filling out prescriptions, but I will be helping at the policy level involving medical ethics."

FDA law, she said, "pits private interests against personal health," because drug companies' huge profit motives and...