Natalie Srinivasan’s greatest strength as a golfer was her mind. She had an uncanny ability to block things out, to the point that Furman coach Jeff Hull would come up and ask, “Are you alive? Can I check your pulse?”
Srinivasan, a former college golf player of the year, had a gut check about her future last year on the Epson Tour in French Lick, Indiana.
“When I started to lose that mind control,” she said, “that’s when I knew I couldn’t do this. The passion wasn’t there.”
Srinivasan finished out the 2022 season on the Epson Tour in October and began studying for the Medical College Admission Test in November. Her clubs still haven’t made it out of the travel case, but she was recently accepted into the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine, where she will start school next fall.
Srinivasan follows the footsteps of not only her father, but of two other former Epson Tour players who are already in medical school: August Kim and Janet Mao.
“I think the three of us will always have a special bond,” said Srinivasan.
The pipeline continues on with Dylan Kim (no relation), a former standout at Baylor and Arkansas, who is currently in the process of studying for the MCAT, and Jaclyn Lee, an Ohio State grad and LPGA player who is in the process of making the switch to med school.
Kim, a former Big Ten conference champion who played for Purdue, has already been president of her class at Vanderbilt School of Medicine. The 28-year-old wants to study orthopedic surgery so that she can work with athletes. Kim’s younger sister, Auston, recently graduated from the Epson Tour and earned an LPGA card. The pair spent five months together as touring pros before August shifted gears to medicine, which has always been her long-term goal.
Mao, a neuroscience major at Northwestern who won NCAA regionals in 2016, quit playing golf competitively in 2021 so that she could begin the 18-month process of getting into medical school. The average applicant applies to 20 schools, Mao said, and Northwestern graduates average around 25 applications. That’s about where Mao landed, who pumped out essays for two months straight.
Mao was accepted to Emory, where her father is a research scientist, last fall and began an intense week of shadowing, “Week on the Wards,” in mid-July. Mao isn’t quite sure what kind of medicine she wants to specialize in, but she does plan to graduate in 2028 with an M.D. and a master’s degree in…
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