From Different Worlds to White Coats: Miranda Berkebile

Editor’s note: This three-part series shares the stories of three medical students and how their unique backgrounds shaped their journeys to medical school.

Instead, they were pursuing law, athletics and performance — wholly different endeavors — before switching to medicine.

But their unique backgrounds have helped them to excel at the Jacobs School. And as these students’ stories demonstrate, choosing medical school can be both a rewarding and attainable option, even if the path there takes some unexpected and unconventional turns.

This is third-year medical student Miranda Berkebile’s story.

Long before she’d ever don a white coat, Berkebile grew up wearing ice skates.

From an early age, Berkebile’s parents encouraged her to pursue something other than just school. With an ice rink near her childhood home, figure skating quickly became that something.

An ice skater since age four, Berkebile spent her first decades immersed in competitive figure skating and performance. As a young girl, Berkebile skated, took lessons from coaches, and practiced three or four times a week.

In high school, she’d skate some five times a week for hours at a stretch. A Syracuse native, she often commuted to Buffalo for coaching, squeezing in homework and study time while her mom drove. 

All that practice paid off; Berkebile was a U.S. figure skating triple gold medalist in ice dancing, freestyle, and moves in the field. And although she says she wasn’t quite Olympic level, she truly enjoyed her time skating and pushing herself to compete six or seven times per year.

As high school graduation came and went, Berkebile was set to enroll at the University of Georgia. Then, just two weeks before freshman move-in, a casting director from Disney On Ice called.

College would have to wait; Berkebile would spend the next year as an ice skating performer with the traveling Disney On Ice show, touring the U.S. while performing as many as 10 or 15 shows a week.

Berkebile was cast as Nemo, the loveable clown fish from “Finding Nemo,” which she humorously describes as “not as glamorous as it sounds.”

“I had to paint my face six times a day because we would have three shows a day,” she recalls. “But it was so much fun, honestly, and it was rewarding to perform for kids every single day.”  

Her year with Disney on Ice became three years after the program launched an international tour that Berkebile didn’t want to miss out on. “The travel was what kept me on,” Berkebile says. “We traveled every single week. I got to see a lot of the world.”

In all, Berkebile says she visited 44 countries across Europe, Asia, Australia and other regions. But after three years, all that travel meant missed birthdays, holidays, and time with family. So when revisiting college, Berkebile opted to stay closer to Syracuse and enrolled as an undergrad at UB.

Aside from skating, Berkebile had always liked science too. She majored in biology and, after considering a few other options, nothing else sounded as exciting as pursuing medical school.

Now at the Jacobs School, Berkebile has participated in clinical rotations in neurology, psychiatry, internal medicine, surgery, and OB-GYN. Having liked all of them, she admits she’s had some trouble choosing a specialty.

Yet her time on the ice and traveling imparted valuable skills for medical school, among them time management and deeper understanding of people and patients.

“My time on tour was spent with a lot of different people, a lot of different cultures, a lot of different nationalities,” Berkebile says. “And that’s something I use every day just interacting with people and interacting with patients. I think when you know a little bit about where somebody comes from and somebody’s culture you can relate to them a little bit better.”