“I was really scared to talk to people, but now I’ll talk to anybody.”

It’s hard to imagine a time when Mary Newman ’87 was scared to talk to people. After all, Mary is a psychiatrist who not only spends her days talking to people but also helping them.

Mary served as a Colonel in the Air Force, earned her MBA, and has lived in countries like Thailand, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Singapore. She currently resides in Abu Dhabi, working as a regional medical officer with the US State Department and providing mental health services to employees and family members of organizations like the FBI and DEA. She is on the road most of the time as her region includes the Middle East and Central Asia.

“I enjoyed and learned a lot in management, but I really wanted to get back into the field,” Mary said of her career path.

While Mary has lived all over the world, to this day, she can still pinpoint where her confidence first began and grew: St. Francis High School in Sacramento, California.

“I felt more warmth, inclusion, support, and community than I ever had. And that I really feel was fundamental to my ability to gain confidence, both socially and academically,” Mary said. “The combination was powerful—the sense of community and the powerful learning environment. It was like a nice little cocoon in which to become the caterpillar to the butterfly.”

After her father’s time in the Army, Mary’s family moved to California from Guam, and she found herself in an educational environment that just wasn’t for her. After a tough middle school experience, she hoped for a better high school one. 

“You’re dealing with puberty, coming from an overseas environment with a lot of diversity, and you’re thrown into a new school. No one really cares about where you’ve been, what you’ve done,” Mary said of her experience. “Somehow, my mom ran into someone who knew about St. Francis. The rest is history.”

While on SFHS campus, Mary decided that she wanted to go to medical school after college, but it was her dad who opened her eyes to a path where she could both pursue her dreams and relive a familiar experience.

“My father, because we had been overseas, reminded me of the doctors we used to see at the health unit in the embassy,” Mary explained. “That was sort of planted in the back of my head.”

Mary followed her father’s military footsteps by joining the Air Force while turning that into an opportunity to become a doctor, debt-free. She completed her medical residency while in active duty.

“You get all the military, weapons training. It was fun. You get a lot of different kinds of added bonuses, like aerospace medical training and parachute survival.”

Looking back, Mary wishes more people knew about scholarship opportunities like the one she had.

“They paid for my entire medical training, all my medical school, tuition, books, equipment. I had a stipend to live on, so I didn’t have any loans. I had to give them four years of my life, and technically, I gave them eight. But it’s experience, and you get paid more than you do as a resident.”

Getting into the mental health space was due to a combination of factors for Mary: she had a family member who was severely bipolar and discovered her love for psychiatry during a rotation in her last year of medical school. 

Texas Christian University, BS in Biology and BA in History, 1991

Indiana University School of Medicine, MD, 1995

University of Memphis, MBA, 2020

“It sort of became this perfect storm of how I wrapped it all together,” Mary said.

Mary explained what she loves so much about psychiatry and mental health:

“It was like solving a puzzle. What’s going on with this person? Is it the medication? Alcohol and substance? A psychosocial issue? Is it something going on in the family? Is it multi-factorial? It was a puzzle to solve with a lot of pieces. And I loved, loved, loved that. This is what I want to do. It’s like the best of both worlds, best of medicine and the best of psychiatry. I was also into liberal arts. It was kind of interesting just to get to that person’s story.”

After 8 years of active duty and about 20 years with the reserves while working for the State department, Mary recently retired from the US Air Force. 

Mary is now thinking of ‘retirement’ from the State department and moving back to the US.

“I just want to do something different. I want to give back,” Mary said. “When you get older, you realize it’s okay to ask somebody else, and it feels so good to be asked as a person who’s older or more experienced. Maybe I can teach, give back, or volunteer, whether it’s in mental health or in something else.”

Even though Mary’s parents have retired to Arizona and she no longer has family in Sacramento, they all still reminisce about her pivotal high school days.

If Mary could go back in time and give her St. Francis self some words of advice, what would she say?

“Don’t be afraid of life. Live the most life you can. You can almost get back anything in your life, but you can never get back your time,” Mary said. “And don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself, experience and try anything and everything you possibly can. Don’t be afraid and just put yourself out there. Just show up, right?”

Written by Frances Wang ‘10