When Julie Margenthaler was 15, her Aunt Verna Mae Mohr — who spent years as the head nurse at Pinckneyville Hospital — got her a job as a nurse's assistant. It was a different era, small-town trust ran deep, and Julie was given access to real clinical work: inserting catheters, placing IVs, doing things most of her future medical school classmates had never attempted. She worked at Pinckneyville Hospital every summer and many weekends through all four years of high school. By the time she enrolled at SIU School of Medicine, she already knew what the inside of a hospital looked and felt like. That early exposure didn't create her ambition — it confirmed it.

Dr. Julie Margenthaler graduated from Trico High School in 1989 as class valedictorian. She had attended Trico from first grade — her first year there coincided with the opening of the elementary school, around 1976 or 1977 — through graduation, growing up in the same small community for more than a decade alongside the same 68 classmates. From Trico, she went to Boston University, where she majored in biology, minored in chemistry, and graduated in 1993. Then came SIU School of Medicine, with the first year at the Carbondale campus and the final three in Springfield. She earned her MD in 1997.

What followed was one of the most demanding training paths in American medicine. She came to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis for her residency — a program that, true to WashU's deeply academic culture, asked residents to step out of clinical training mid-career and spend time in a laboratory. Julie did three years of research between her second and final years of surgical residency. Eight years total, followed by a one-year breast oncology fellowship. She joined the WashU faculty in 2006 and has been a Professor of Surgery there for nearly twenty years, operating on breast cancer patients, training residents and fellows and medical students, and doing research — including, in a full-circle moment she clearly enjoys, collaborating with Kaden Wilson, the son of her Trico classmate Aaron Wilson, who is now a first-year student at St. Louis University medical school.

The teachers who shaped her are easy to name. Dr. Richard Eldredge, the eighth-grade science teacher, took her to the state science fair competition multiple years running and was instrumental in making science feel like something she could pursue seriously. In high school, Cheri Riley and Jack Smith continued to deepen that foundation as her science teachers. Bill Riley, the guidance counselor and Cheri’s husband, helped her navigate the college application process. Jackie Carruthers taught English throughout her high school years — and Julie, who now spends a significant portion of her professional life explaining diagnoses and treatment options to frightened patients, credits that training as more important to her career than she once might have expected. Ms. Whitehorn taught math. "The teachers seemed very vested in our future," Julie says. "Whatever we accomplished, they were going to take a lot of personal pride in that."

Outside the classroom, she played volleyball, was a member of National Honor Society, played trumpet in band, and was part of a softball team that made it to the state championship her senior year, finishing second — a team recently inducted into the Trico Hall of Fame. Her closest high school friendships are still intact: she and Karen Jackson Furman (the class salutatorian, now a CEO), Deanna Wedemeyer Davis, Tera Rednour, and Angie Kiehna Gadwood still vacation together and see each other regularly. "Those relationships are something unique to growing up with the same people for 12 years," she says.

She is direct about what the transition from Trico to Boston University felt like: disorienting in scale — her graduating class of 68 gave way to a commencement of 5,000 — but not in preparation. "I really had a very good foundation going in, despite it being a small rural school," she says. The advice she offers to anyone reading this is simple and hard-earned: optimize the resources around you, work relentlessly, and don't assume the size of where you started limits where you can go. "No matter what small town you're coming from," she says, "you can get to the point you want to be."