Every day in the emergency room, Dr Carl Allamby is back in his auto shop

The biology class was compulsory. Carl Allamby was in his thirties, owned a car repair business in Cleveland, Ohio, and was studying at night for a business degree he hoped would help him expand it. The course required one science module. He had put it off until near the end.

“When I took the biology class, it was just phenomenal,” he told NPR. “I loved it from the moment that I first walked in there.” He went home and told his wife, Kim, a physical therapist, that he was thinking about medicine.

Allamby graduated from Northeast Ohio Medical University in 2019, at 47, the oldest person in his class. In 2022, at 51, he started work as an attending physician (the US term for a fully qualified senior doctor) in emergency medicine at Cleveland Clinic’s Hillcrest Hospital. In December, Cleveland Magazine named him one of its Most Interesting People of 2026 and reported that a television series based on his life is in development.

Nineteen, with a repair shop

He grew up in East Cleveland, one of six children. His father sold door to door and the family relied on welfare for most of his childhood. As a boy he wanted to be a doctor; the first Black doctor he had seen, he told Cleveland Magazine, was Denzel Washington’s character in the television drama St. Elsewhere. Life went another way. By 19 he had his own repair shop.

He enrolled at Ursuline College at 34, in 2006. After biology came pre-medical classes at Cuyahoga Community College from 2010, taken while working full time, then medical school from 2015 and an emergency medicine residency at Cleveland Clinic Akron. He sold the business along the way, after 25 years.

He does not dress up what that involved. Anyone watching his life in those years, he told NPR, would have seen a man alone in a quiet room with a pile of notes.

“My philosophy has always been to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.” — Carl Allamby, to NPR

The same job, different patients

Allamby says the work changed less than people assume. Customers trusted him with their cars and relied on him to find the fault; patients do the same with more at stake.

“Every day I walk into the ER, I feel like I’m walking right back into my auto shop.” — Carl Allamby, to Cleveland Magazine

Outside the hospital he is learning the piano.

Why this matters

Allamby noticed something about himself as a mature student: with his childhood pressures behind him, he could give a lesson his whole attention. Younger classmates had other things to deal with, he told NPR. “I knew how to stay focused on the task in front of me.”

Focus is half of it. Method is the other half. A 2013 review of ten common study techniques by John Dunlosky and colleagues at Kent State University rated two as highly effective: practice testing (quizzing yourself) and distributed practice (spreading study over weeks). Rereading, highlighting and summarising, the methods most of us were taught, came bottom.

If there is a subject you put off

• Take one class before you plan a career. Allamby’s whole change began with a single module. Our guide to going back to study lists where adults learn, from the Open University to US community colleges, and who pays.
• Test yourself, and space it out. Five memory techniques that work explains both methods.
• Expect it to be long and mostly dull. He took about a decade from the biology class to the medical degree.
• Recruit your people. There will be times you feel like giving up, he told NPR; those are the times to lean on the people around you.

Marie Fowler finished a doctorate; Allamby started with a prerequisite. Both began by signing up.