Stuck at home while recovering from mono, Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft received a gift at 7 years old that shaped the rest of her life: a microscope. She loved inspecting mealworms and leaves underneath the lens so much that her mother, Paula Wesner, predicted that her daughter would become a doctor.
Zuidgeest-Craft pursued a career in health care years later, becoming a nurse practitioner and pediatric educator. She still planned to become a doctor, but she put her goal on hold while she raised two children. Then she remarried and had two more children, delaying her dream again.
It took a wake-up call in 2020 — when her husband narrowly survived a brain hemorrhage — for Zuidgeest-Craft to review her bucket list.
Zuidgeest-Craft’s husband, Carl Craft, decided he wanted to make traveling a priority. Zuidgeest-Craft, in her late 60s, said she wanted to go to medical school.
“He thought I was insane,” she said.
By diving into her retirement funds, Zuidgeest-Craft paid for a Caribbean medical school, where she’s the same age as some of her classmates’ grandparents. At the end of May, Zuidgeest-Craft, 72, will receive a doctor of medicine degree as her school’s oldest-ever graduate.
The diploma won’t just be a souvenir. Zuidgeest-Craft will begin a three-year residency — with a specialty in family medicine — at a west Michigan hospital in July. She hopes to work as a doctor as long as she can.
“When you have to do it for work … you feel like, ‘I got to do this so that I can pay my rent,’” Zuidgeest-Craft, who has three grandchildren, told The Washington Post. “I want to do this because I really enjoy this.”
A dream put on hold
By her early 30s, Zuidgeest-Craft had received multiple degrees and was happily working as a nurse practitioner while raising her two children, Ginger and Sean. She planned to go to medical school by age 40.
When she got divorced and remarried a few years later, she and her new husband decided to have more children. She gave birth to her two youngest when she was 42 and 49 years old.
Zuidgeest-Craft instilled a motto in her children — “Never say never” — and they applied it to their own goals. For example, her eldest daughter, Ginger Zuidgeest, wanted to graduate early from Valparaiso University with a meteorology degree so she could start her career sooner, but at first she worried because it had never been done.
“So what?” Ginger, who now goes by Ginger Zee as a meteorologist for ABC News, recalled her mom replying. “Go tell them that you’re going to be the one that does it.”
Zuidgeest-Craft tried to follow her own advice as she grew older, but she thought she might never attend medical school. After her husband almost died of a brain hemorrhage, Zuidgeest-Craft said she felt a renewed sense of urgency.
“It hit me like, ‘Oh, my God, this life is short,’” she said.
Zuidgeest-Craft and Craft both fulfilled their bucket list priorities. Zuidgeest-Craft retired from nursing and enrolled at the St. James School of Medicine in Anguilla in the Caribbean, a school that doesn’t require the Medical College Admission Test. Zuidgeest-Craft then took on clinical rotations in Chicago, West Virginia and South Texas — and Craft came along.
Her energy hasn’t dwindled as she has aged, according to her children. Even while raising her two eldest kids and working two jobs, she would return home and do yard work. Her son, Sean Zuidgeest, used to pretend he was reading a textbook when he heard his mom’s quick footsteps approaching his room so she wouldn’t ask him for help.
Moving away from her family for medical school made Zuidgeest-Craft feel guilty, and her children worried she wouldn’t fit in. But Zuidgeest-Craft reminded herself of what she said her younger sister, Darci, told her: “You’ve always taken care of everybody else, and finally you’re just going to do what you want to do.”
There were setbacks; Zuidgeest-Craft considered quitting after failing a biochemistry exam her first year. But despite being four or five decades older than most of her classmates, she bonded with them over morning yoga sessions on the beach and their anxiety about tests. She tutored younger students in anatomy and physiology, she said, and hosted movie nights, where she and Craft showed 1980s films.
“I don’t think there’s a single person that we went to school with that didn’t like Dawn,” said Jesse Oswald, 33, Zuidgeest-Craft’s classmate.
Oswald lived with Zuidgeest-Craft and Craft in a two-bedroom apartment during a clinical rotation in Chicago in 2024 and 2025. Many mornings, Zuidgeest-Craft woke up so energized that she motivated Oswald to get going, he said.
Zuidgeest-Craft considered skipping residency and working as a nurse practitioner at a health care clinic in Shelby, Michigan, after she graduated, fearing she wouldn’t have the stamina for long hours.
But during a clinical rotation at a medical center in McAllen, Texas, this year, Zuidgeest-Craft said an attending doctor told her that she was too talented for her degree to just be a “trophy.” The next month, Trinity Health Medical Center in Muskegon, Michigan, accepted her into its residency program.
Even with a full workload — and her 73rd birthday approaching in July — Zuidgeest-Craft is already thinking about her next goal: modernizing the medical school curriculum.
“I feel alive,” she said, “when I work in the medical field.”
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