Episode 45: How Physician Education Is Improving the Patient Experience, with Valerie Weber

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lynn S. Evans and I am the host of Power Of The Purse Podcast. There was a time in my life not too long ago when I believed three things about money. One, women are not supposed to talk about or be included in any conversations about money. Two, women don’t have the natural ability to understand anything about money. Three, men know best how to manage money. Those truths I made up about money guided me for years until I realized money was not a foreign language or some other obscure academic exercise and it was something I could not only understand, but teach to other women.

Too many times I’ve heard stories from women who ought to know better, but didn’t until they were forced to because of divorce, widowhood, job loss or the approach of retirement. This podcast will add another chapter to a rich history of successful women who when faced with some personal challenges found the ability to step beyond them. We’ll examine some of the truths they made up about money from their life experiences and how that shaped the paths they chose. My mission is to help women have a healthy positive relationship with money. With that in mind, my guest today is Dr. Valerie Weber. She is originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. The youngest of three children raised by an engineer father and a stay-at-home mother.

She attended Washington & Jefferson College. Earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology in 1987 and then an MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. She trained in internal medicine in Philadelphia and began both her career and her family during those years. She is divorced and has two children, Morgan, aged 20, who is studying computer engineering at Bucknell University, and Daniel, age 17, a high school student at Abington Heights in Clarks Summit. Valerie currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after many years away and is enjoying getting to know the city again. Welcome, Dr. Weber.

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy and excited to be here today.

Well, that’s great because as I said to you earlier, you and I have known each other when you were a part of an organization here in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is now called Geisinger Commonwealth Medical College. It is just amazing to me to think of where it was when you first started as one of the original senior staff members and this has progressed to where it is today. It’s a phenomenal journey. I say thank you as a member of this Northeastern Pennsylvania community for being a very integral part of that development of the college.

Well, thank you for saying that. It really was a wonderful mission. It’s still an institution that’s very, very near to my heart having put blood, sweat and tears in for five years.

Exactly.

It’s done well. I don’t know if you noticed that Dr. Gerald Tracy, who was one of the original founding fathers if you want to call it that of the institution, has been honored by being one of the… I forget what the term is, but the award from the Pennsylvania Medical Society as one of the pioneers in the medical field. Again, if people are finally recognizing what an incredible task that was to take it from just simply an idea and put it into reality and what a reality it is physically and otherwise. It’s a huge part of this area’s economy.

Thanks again.

Yes. Yes. It’s quite a centerpiece and such a great thing. I mean I grew up in another small town or small city in Pennsylvania, Erie. Very similar to Scranton actually and very much in the same similar way medically underserved. As a native of Pennsylvania, it really was close to my heart to try to help the medical workforce so that Pennsylvanians really can get the healthcare they deserve.

They are doing that. I think this is the fifth or sixth year they’ve graduated doctors and they’re spanned around. It’s really quite wonderful.

It’s great.

You left Erie, Pennsylvania as you said and how did you get from there to Washington & Jefferson College and why?

I was always a good student growing up. My family, both my parents just made it so clear that education was the key to success in life. I think if that’s one theme we could talk about probably as women and finances is having your education is really so important because whatever happens to you in life you have that, right? My parents were just very, very… It’s remarkable because my father was first-generation college and he grew up on a dairy farm in Northwestern Pennsylvania where they had very limited resources. It was very isolated. He was one of five children. They all went to college even though his parents never had. I just had this very strong ethic in my family of the importance of education, importance of college.

I had this inkling. I had done medical volunteer work. My mother, who was a stay-at-home, was very, very devoted to doing volunteer work in the community with the elderly. I had this love, this passion especially for elderly people. I started thinking, I didn’t have any female role model in my family except for school teachers and some nurses and I thought, “Well, I’m a woman. I could be a school teacher or a nurse.” I didn’t really have aspirations that I really could be a physician until I had an older brother that went to medical school. He was six years my senior. I said to myself, “You know, I’m smarter than him. If he could go to medical school, I’m sure I could.”

I started to have higher aspirations for myself, but I was a little bit timid to say it out loud lest I should maybe fail. I went to college with this idea that I would be pre-med. Once I got there and dug my heels in and got to work, I realized I could be successful. I went from there to University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and got my medical path started.

How many women were in your class when you were there?

Oh my. Our class was around 180 and it wasn’t… Nowadays medical school classes are 50/50 women and men. I think it was more about 30% then, women versus men. It wasn’t quite how it was now, but certainly nothing like the early days of medicine where there were no women and then just a very few for many years.

Did you find any discrimination when you were involved, not necessarily in college in medical school, but once you got out into the world, did you notice anything different about the way you were treated as a woman physician?

I’ve thought about this long and hard because I know that there is discrimination. I know there are pay gaps particularly within academic medicine. That’s well documented. I don’t think that I really felt much discrimination. In my own mind, I just knew that I was as good as anybody else. I think once in a while there would be a patient or somebody who would just assume because you’re a woman you must be the nurse. When you walk into the room and you introduce yourself and you introduce yourself as Dr. Weber and you have a long white coat on and they just… It’s their own expectation. I actually found that once I was out in practice and seeing patients, I had many patients including men and even older men who really preferred seeing a woman for whatever reason. The things that we do bring to a table. No. I just certainly never experienced anything really overt or anything that I found disturbing. I was fortunate I guess.

That’s great. There are other women physicians I’ve interviewed who had some incredible stories. You just say wow, but that’s good. I mean the thing is you obviously have maintained a professional attitude and then did not create any problems. Then who was it? You said your brother was the one who inspired you to get started on this path, but who was it? Was there anybody when you were in school that was a mentor to you?

Certainly I had some wonderful, wonderful teachers in my high school. Where I came from outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, suburb of Erie, Pennsylvania, it was not… It was not necessarily a place where you could have expectations. A lot of people stayed locally and many people didn’t go to college, but there weren’t too many people that went on to get doctorate-level educations from where I grew up. It’s a bit of a poor area. We had some spectacular public school education, spectacular teachers there. I remember particularly a few English teachers who really… Learning to write is a skill. If you learn to write well, that carries you through. I think some very, very inspiring professors in college, biology professors and such that really got me on my…launched my love of the human organism and how well that works. It’s just amazingly fascinating. Then I went to an Ivy League medical school where most of my classmates were Ivy League graduates. I have to say I was well prepared by my education. I had to work very, very hard being in the company of people who were very well educated and extremely bright. I think I had to work maybe a little harder than other people, but I was determined.

Where did you make the decision that you wanted to get away from the practice of medicine and get more into the academic and leadership role?

Yes. It’s very interesting. I never had any aspirations of leadership in my career in medicine. I went into medicine because I wanted to help people, take care of patients and because I was fascinated with the content of medicine, the field of medicine. Internal medicine residency is three years long and then my third year, they asked me to stay a fourth year and be what’s called chief resident. That is sort of somebody who leads all the residents. I’d never thought about a leadership career, but somebody sat me down and said, “You know, we really think you would be good at it.” I had really developed a love of teaching while I was a resident.

One of the things that you don’t realize that you’re signing up to do when you become a doctor and go to medical school is that once you graduate and you accept a residency, it’s an apprenticeship model of education. You start taking students under your wing and you all of a sudden realize you’re a teacher too. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed teaching and I enjoyed leadership and so I was asked to do things. As a competent, organized woman, I think you are asked to do things. If you agree to do them, you find out that you like them and on and on. For many years I combined… I went from that, chief resident year. I got my first job. I was actually medical director of a clinic in Philadelphia called the J. Edwin Wood Clinic, affiliated with Pennsylvania Hospital.

That clinic was an amazing place. It was my first job. I barely knew what I was doing, but I was seeing patients and I was running a clinic. I had wonderful colleagues there. That really launched my career both in practice and leadership. Seeing patients, but then also making things happen organizationally wise. The way I always thought about it was that it was an extension of patient care. I can see patients, one patient at a time, and help them or I can also look at the… For example, how is the clinic running? Is this working well for patients? Are they having to wait too long? Are they running into trouble getting into the office or getting hold of us on the phone? I really enjoyed making those things better so that people could be served better and I found that I was good at that.

I ended up accepting higher positions that went on and more responsibility and took a position as a…let’s call it a division chief of general internal medicine at Geisinger Health System and I was there for a decade and oh, just learned so much about healthcare and leadership in that fine organization. Just a succession of things that combined practice and leadership and teaching. I guess the bottom line is I just really like a lot of variety in my work. I like creativity. I like to be creative. That was just how that all happened.

Well, in your current position, which is I failed to mention before and I apologize, that you are the vice dean of educational affairs at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania. That is a position obviously of educational affairs. That kind of blends right into to what you just talked about where your love is, your passion is to educate physicians. I shouldn’t say how have you, have you done anything that you can see results from in the last I guess three and a half years that you have been doing that have made a difference in the lives of the physicians?

Oh my goodness. You alluded to the fact that I had spent five years helping to start the Commonwealth Medical College and that was really when I got very, very deeply involved in undergraduate medical education, which is the MD degree part of education and learning how all that works. Again it’s the theme for me of making things better for patients. I had observed during my medical career that not every time does things go smoothly. You want your doctors maybe to communicate better with you. You maybe want your doctors to understand better what you’re trying to say. In this day and age doctors need to be computer savvy. They need to understand about quality improvement and health outcomes and all of these new fields, health ethics.

Physicians need to have an understanding of quality improvement and health outcomes. Click To Tweet

These are fields that have really emerged since I went to medical school. What we did at the Commonwealth Medical College and now what I’ve done here is totally recreate how we educate doctors so that they have all of those new skills. Doctors will always need to be really smart clinicians, know all about the human body, be able to understand how that works, be able to diagnose and treat patients. More and more they also have to be masters of medical information. There’s so much information available on the Internet. Patients are encountering it. Doctors have to both understand it and how to translate it to patients. Doctors have to understand a lot of areas that they never… I never received education on.

Doctors must be masters of medical information. Click To Tweet

We’ve totally redone our curriculum here at Drexel. I’ve been here three years now. We’re about to unroll a new curriculum actually next month in August to our entering class. I feel great about this because it’s all about making things better for patients through educating doctors better.

I was also thinking when you mentioned that another woman who has been helpful in what I’ve been trying to do with the podcast, I don’t know if you have been introduced to her. Her name is Dr. Eliza Lo Chin and she is the current executive director of the American Medical Women’s Association. One of the things that she’s been doing, she’s out in San Francisco, but she’s been back here at Drexel several times because if I understand this correctly with what she said, that’s where the American Medical Women’s Association began and a lot of the records of that institution are there. Fascinating.

That makes sense because Drexel’s… One of Drexel’s two forbearer institution, Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann, are the two medical schools that came together to make Drexel about 12 years ago now. The Women’s Medical College is the predecessor to Medical College of Pennsylvania and that was the only place that women could get a medical degree for most of the last 200 years. [From 1846] I think up until this past century when people finally started letting women be mainstream in medical schools. Yes, that makes sense that that association would have started at our school.

I don’t know if I got the numbers right, but the hundredth anniversary of that organization I think was three years ago. They held the annual meeting in Chicago because apparently the woman who started this was from there. However, their next annual meeting is going to be in Philadelphia in March and it’s going to be because of that, because of the association with the Women’s Medical College you mentioned and Drexel.

Oh wonderful.

It should be very exciting to see all this. Anyway, the point I’m making is that there are a lot of background numbers, I guess backstories is probably the appropriate word, for women who have been in medicine that today with the women, as you said, 50% of the classes are composed of women, they have no idea of what that was 20 or 30 years ago even, let alone a hundred years ago when women could not be physicians because there was nowhere to go except these rogue kind of places that would allow women to do schooling.

Yeah, absolutely.

One never knows what they encountered when they were through with their MDs if they even were recognized as such. I want to switch this over to a part of your background that has to do with your relationship with money because I’m thinking of what you said when you talked about being in a place…growing up in a place like Erie where the expectations of the people who lived in the area were very low relatively speaking to the rest of the United States. The two choices you had as a woman were teacher or nurse. My sister and I are the perfect living examples of that. My background is as a teacher. I have an undergraduate degree in teaching with a major in French, which of course I’ve never used. My sister has a master’s degree in nursing and lives in the Philadelphia area.

That was our choice. When we were looking at what was possible, those were the choices as you said. Each of us chose one path. Obviously we didn’t end up… I didn’t end up in the same place, but there were all kind of issues that I remember relative to money and being able to afford to go to school. I was thinking about that when you talked about your father and his siblings because a farm didn’t generate a whole lot of money.

No.

I’m curious to know too how did your grandparents manage to be able to put five children through college?

I don’t think they did. I think what happened was my grandfather died suddenly about age 51 and my grandmother did it by herself. My grandmother who really…my father’s mother was an incredible inspiration for me. She raised five children on a remote farm or in a dairy farm. They all went to college and she did it for many years by herself. I think the kids worked their way through college. I think my dad worked a few jobs to accomplish that and had a scholarship maybe or two. I think the other siblings did the same. I think my dad’s attitude with… My dad was an engineer so we were okay for most of my childhood. In the ’70s in Western Pennsylvania the economy was pretty rough.

There was a period of time where my dad did get laid off from an engineering job and it took him a while to find one. I think that made a really big impression on me. I remember at the time I was taking dance lessons and guitar lessons and I remember that my parents had to say to me that we needed to stop doing that for a year or so until dad found another job. My father would always say to me when he was talking to us about education and talking to us about our career choice, he would just…or just to choose something that wasn’t so vulnerable and tied to the economy in the way engineering was. Maybe that’s sort of how medicine came to be. I’m not sure. Although there are physicians that do lose their jobs in this day and age, it’s not something that’s quite as vulnerable.

I think that made a big impression. I learned what it was to be, although not poor really by comparison of some other people, vulnerable, economically vulnerable. I think paying for school, I think my dad had the attitude like where there’s a will, there is a way. Don’t worry about it. My parents did help me a little bit, but I mostly through financial aid, loans and some scholarships and things did it mostly myself. When I went to medical school, I had to take out loans as do most people in medical school. At that time they were fairly sizable loans, but you pay them off.

What about your siblings? Did they all go to college?

Yes. Yes. My brother is the oldest, six years senior to me. He went to college and then on to medical school. I think he spent the entire life savings for college my parents had. It was probably spent in his first year, right?

Oh yes.

No, I mean college being so expensive. There was really nothing left. My sister who was the second child, three years after my brother, we were all three years apart, she went to college for accounting and still does that. She’s a financial auditor. We all made it. I think we all had to take out some loans that we all paid off and it worked out. It worked out.

As did I and my sister. That’s kind of the way it went. Same thing really. My father’s sister was the only one who actually went to college. She got a degree in teaching of course, but my father tried to go to college and just never quite… He hated it. Again from the two of them, my mom and my father, was you’ve got to get an education. You have to do this. Okay. Fine. I hear it. I hear it. It’s just interesting that we both put ourselves through school as well with loans and everything else. There is an assumption today that our children are just expecting that they will have the money or the wherewithal from mom and dad and that’s just how it is. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I can’t really figure that out, but for some people it is a good thing in the sense that they don’t worry about where the next tuition payment’s coming from because they’re focused on what they’re doing and that’s okay. There are also people I think like you and I who know that you had to do both and somehow we did it. I don’t know if that’s an advantage or disadvantage, but that’s an interesting way to approach what you learn about money because if you learn that it’s there and it’s just there as an assumption, my concern is then what do you do when life hands you the lemons as you get older and you have a time period where you don’t have a job or you are vulnerable and you know it’s coming. Good thing and bad thing.

I think about doing the way we did it is you learn some resilience and you learn that there’s some way to get around it and you’re not just stuck. Besides what you’ve learned there from that experience, what could you say is your first memory around money?

It’s a funny one actually. I think I was about five years old. I think I may have been in kindergarten. I don’t know why. I noticed that one of my older siblings had done something around the house and had earned a dollar or something. I decided that that was something that I wanted to do. I wanted to have a dollar. I wanted to have some money. I remember writing this very long letter that I slid under my parent’s bedroom door I think of all the reasons why I deserve… I was too little to really do anything useful, but all the reasons like I was such a nice kid and would you give me a dollar? My dad did. He came into my bedroom and gave me a dollar. I was so enamored with that dollar. I remember putting it in my pajama pocket and sleeping with it.

Then I woke up the next day and it was gone. It had fallen out of the pocket. I did find it eventually, but I was panicking. I mean talk about a very vivid first memory of money.

I also want to know did your parents save that letter that you wrote?

I don’t think so. Yeah, no.

That would be fun to see.

Yeah. As I did get old enough to do things, we didn’t get an allowance really. We were expected to keep our rooms clean and things like that. When I was old enough, I remember washing my dad’s car. He had a company car at one point and he would pay me I think $5. If I would wash his car every Saturday, I would get $5 and I would do that when I was like maybe 10, 11. As soon as I was old enough, I got a job. I worked at a local amusement park in a fish, in one of the games, the fish pond game. That was a lot of fun. I also worked as a checkout girl for many years actually during breaks from college as well.

Where was that? In a variety store or grocery store?

I worked at Kmart actually. I worked at Waldameer Amusement Park in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is still there. Then I worked for a while at a Burger King. I made hamburgers. Then I got a great job offer at Kmart. I worked there every summer in college and on holiday breaks when I would come home for Christmas break. Minimum wage, which I think when I started might have been $2.95 or right around $3. If you worked a whole week, a 40 hour week, you… They would pay you in cash in little envelopes. After taxes, you might have $85.

What?

Yeah, they paid you in cash. You get a little envelope with cash.

Oh my gosh. Wow. You actually got 100% of what you earned?

No. No. No. It wasn’t under the table or anything. They just gave you cash rather than a check. No. If I earned $120, $3 an hour times 40 hours, I might take a little under maybe 90 home in cash. I would work a whole summer and make around a thousand dollars full-time.

What did you do with that money when you got it in cash?

That was for college. That was for books and college money, spending money and things.

Did you put it into a checking account or did you save it some place in the house?

Probably a savings account, right? I think a savings account.

You had your little bank.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. A passbook savings account. Yup. I don’t even remember how did you get money out. I guess you had to go to the bank because there was no other way to do it. You had to go to the bank. I remember at some point right around the time I started driving, MAC Machine started. I’m old enough to remember being a kid and being in the car on a Friday, that was payday for my dad and my mom having to run the check to the bank and then get some money for the weekend, cash money, because there was no other way to operate except cash money on the weekend. If you didn’t have your money on the weekend, you wouldn’t do anything on the weekend if you didn’t have it. Waiting in the long line at the drive-through at the bank. We have it so good now, don’t we?

Yes.

If you didn’t have your cash, you weren’t having much of a fun weekend because you weren’t going anywhere or doing anything.

Well, the trick for us now is to remember what the pin is for our ATM machines. That could get tricky.

I think they’re so easy. Money is so easy now.

It is.

Access to it anyway.

It’s way too easy actually. Too easy. What’s been the most threatening to your financial security?

First of all, I would just say the challenge of going through medical school and having all those loans. I was fortunate. My attitude towards money was a little bit cavalier I think. When I was younger, I think in college I signed up and got a credit card and I just didn’t understand what was wrong with just running a balance on my credit card. I married somebody who had a Quaker upbringing and was raised to be very frugal and very smart with money. I was married to this person for 16 years and he was very good in making me understand what was wrong with that and why you would want to pay your credit card bills off in full every month. I actually picked up some very, very good financial habits during my marriage.

One of the things that I picked up and he actually was very encouraging, you pay off your student loans before they’re due. We paid double on them. We did without things to pay double on them so that they were paid off much quicker and I paid much less interest than I would have. Financially as a couple we were good. I think that I actually am a believer in spending things… I believe in spending my money on things that are experiences in particular like travel that are going to give me pleasure and memories. There were some things in my marriage that we did have some financial differences. I won’t say difficulties. Differences. We were well off, but we had some financial differences. He managed the money more. I was completely aware of the money.

Spend money on experiences, not things. Click To Tweet

He wanted me to be aware of the money and I knew where everything was and what there was, but he paid the bills and did all those things…kind of division of labor of how we ran our household. When we got divorced, which was in 2009, that was definitely the biggest financial blow I would ever have in my life just because of the way that divorce works and how much money you lose during it. Particularly what affected me was my retirement accounts and having to give away that account that was mostly money that I had earned, but having to give half of it away. That was obviously a setback that I will be working for many years to try to recover from, but it’s one of those things that happens.

Getting back to the theme of as a woman having your education, I remember vividly thinking that having my education, having an ability to support myself well is the most precious thing that I have. That everything else can be replaced. Of course, your health, your children, all those things you hold dear. Your education and your credentials, there’s just no replacement for that. I remember thinking, “Gosh, what if I’d been a stay-at-home wife in this relationship for 20 years and had two kids and had nothing? What would I do? What would I be doing to support myself right now?”

Having the ability to support yourself well is invaluable. Click To Tweet

It was just a moment that I just was having so much compassion for women that did not have the advantages that I had of having this educational background. It’s just hard to fathom how people in that situation are able to recover.

I think of that specifically with your grandmother and how hard it was for her not through divorce, but through the death of a spouse, that she had to just… She had no college degree or any way to support herself except to continue to do what she was doing.

Yes. She ran a farm and she worked in a department store. She got a job working in a department store I think evenings and weekends or working around the farm work. Yes. She eventually did marry. Back in the day there was no Match.com or anything like that. You married the guy with the farm down the road. She married the adjacent farm. They had a very lovely marriage actually for many years. I think that took probably some of the strain off as well.

I’m sure. That’s an interesting way. That is a coping mechanism a lot of women choose. One of the things that I’ve preached about is that I just want to make sure that women don’t see that as a choice simply because it puts a roof over their heads and that you don’t sell your soul for that. That’s kind of what happens is they opt in to find somebody that can make me feel financially comfortable and the rest of it is optional. I don’t care if I love him. I know. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine it myself.

No. I can’t imagine it, although I think… This podcast is not about love and relationships, but I think that our expectations for that are different than men too. Culturally I think that to have a roof over your head and to have somebody you’re compatible with who treats you well might have been enough for people then and of course we have much higher, at least we should have much higher aspirations for ourselves. And as independent financially, able-to-support-ourselves women, we have the luxury of that, right, of not having to worry about that. We can sort of try to actualize or self-actualize as far as relationships. It’s not something we need, right?

You would think that, but I still think it’s amazing to me the women that I know who are professionals and are very well entrenched in their own careers marry men that aren’t necessarily their equal. I don’t mean that financially, but they’re just… I can’t imagine… I guess I do know where it comes from, but there’s an expectation I think with a lot of women who came from families where their mothers were stay-at-home moms that they should be good mothers and that they need to be assuming that role. This is the role model I saw, which was my mother. Being at home, having a good home, being a good cook and all that kind of stuff.

I am, on the other hand, out there in a so-called man’s world in a man’s profession and there is this need to say, “I’m still a viable woman because I got married and had kids,” but it’s not necessarily the best thing for them.

No. It’s funny.

It breaks my heart.

Well, yeah. I guess maybe, I don’t know why, but I have not felt that sort of pressure. I mean I think I’m a different role model for my children. I think I’m a role model who’ve… I think my post divorce and it’s been like nine years now, I’ve taken them all around the world on adventures. I think I’m a role model of independence and excitement and adventure. I think that that’s a great role model as a woman to show my children. Both my son who will choose somebody to be with someday and my daughter who in her own mind, in her own right, excuse me, is an incredible, incredible woman and has taught me a thing or two already.

Didn’t you also say that what you are most proud of is the fact that both of your children have grown into some pretty awesome adults?

Oh my gosh. They are. As they grow into adults, you can have so much fun with them in ways that you can’t when they’re children. Of course, they’re 20 and almost 18, so they’re not quite done yet. They still have things to learn and to grow at. The kind of conversations you can have with them, the kind of things you can do with them, I think it’s even better than… Of course, we miss the days when they were little, but it’s just amazing. The things you learn from them because they view the world with different eyes. They’re millennials and they’re digital natives and they provide me with much excitement.

I bet. Resources. When you can’t figure out how to do something, you pick up the phone and they’ve got it in a heartbeat, right?

Yeah. Well, my daughter’s going to have a degree in computer engineering. Talk about such a great path that she has as a woman. That field is still very, very uncommonly inhabited by women. I think that field is less than 20% women. That’s created some opportunities for her. There’s been some opportunities she’s had for networking and national conferences. There’s a wonderful women’s conference for computer engineering every year where she won a scholarship to attend. That led to summer internships. It’s wonderful. She’s a trailblazer in her field. It’s wonderful.

That has to be one of the most exciting things for you to watch.

It is very exciting.

That’s great. Well, I’m going to say thanks to my guest today, Dr. Valerie Weber, and to all of you in my Power Of The Purse community. I hope today’s podcast was helpful in enriching your understanding of money and how it can help you achieve your life goals. If you’d like to spend 15 minutes on a call with me and ask me questions about your personal finances, please go to my website PowerOfThePursePodcast.com, select the contact tab and find a time that works for you. Thanks again, Dr. Weber, for sharing your time and knowledge and let everybody where and how they can reach you.

Oh yeah. If anybody would want to reach out to me, they could contact me via email. It’s at Drexel. It’s VDW32@Drexel.edu. I’d be happy to chat with anybody about these issues.

That sounds great. Wonderful role model. It was great to talk to you again, Dr. Weber.

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure and a lot of fun to speak with you today.

It has been for me as well. Until the next time, thanks for listening and remember, money is not the enemy. Your ignorance of it is. Thank you and goodbye.

We hope you’ve enjoyed your time with us on this episode of the Power Of The Purse Podcast. If you’re ready to take action, go to LynnSEvans.com/call and sign up for an exclusive one-on-one call with your host, Lynn Evans. Thanks again and join us next time to explore more ways you can take control of your finances and your life. 

How to contact Valerie:

• Email: VDW32@Drexel.edu

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