Car mechanic Carl Allamby graduates from university at 47, studies medicine

- At 16, Carl Allamby started work at an auto spare parts store because his family has no money to send him to college and his grades are not good

- Allamby later moved on to be a motor mechanic and then opened a second hand car selling business

- With money, 40-year-old Allamby decided to go get a degree in business but ended up graduating as a medical doctor at 47

A car mechanic has dumped his career as an auto repairer to now work as a people’s mechanic at Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital.

Carl Allamby began a career in life as a car mechanic in his neighbourhood having started work at an auto spare parts store at 16. He became an expert diagnostician in fixing broken down cars especially Chevys and Fords. This he did with the older guys in his East Cleveland neighbourhood.

Allamby could run through a checklist in his head, zero in on and car problem, and fix it and many felt he had found a career destined for him.

But all of a sudden, he made a career overhaul and now does the same thing he was doing with cars with people as an emergency medicine resident.

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Allamby rebuild his career and graduated from medical school in 2019 at the age of 47. He went from Carl the mechanic to Dr Allamby. He had to navigate a 180-degree turn without stepping the brakes and has narrowed, by one, the huge gap in black male doctors in the US.

The doctor grew up in East Cleveland with two brothers and three sisters. His dad was a part-time photographer who also sold cookware door-to-door. His mom was a stay-at-home parent.

While he was great at fixing cars, he was not that great in his academics at school. He graduated from Shaw High School with less than a 2.0 grade point average and never had the dream of going to college because money was scarce in his home.

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He started fixing cars at car parks after close of work as an auto spare parts boy and graduated to an auto mechanic. He later ventured into selling second hand cars for 26 years before he decided to pursue a business degree to help him in his line of business.

So in 2006, decades after high school, Allamby went after a degree by taking night classes so as not to affect his business at Ursuline College. While at the college, he detested taking biology as he was in school for a degree in business and saw no correlation between biology and his course of study until his counsellor advised him otherwise that he needed biology to graduate and after just one class, his orientation changed.

In an interview with Cleveland.com, Allamby said his first class in biology was an overview of life. The teacher, Dr Micah Watts, a resident at the time in interventional radiology at the Cleveland Clinic made it look so interesting.

“He just lit up when he walked into the room, after the first hour of class, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do. I have to go into medicine.’ It was like a light switched on.”

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Allamby once dreamt of becoming a doctor when he was a child, but, the idea was beaten out of him while in junior high and high school all because he had no black doctors as role models.

“Nobody to even to emulate, just to say, 'Hey, I know a guy who is a doctor who looks like me and if he can do it, I can do it," he said.

He went into medical school at 40 despite being married and having a family of his own. He graduated at 47.

Allamby hopes to inspire more black students to medicine when they are young.

“When I speak at a junior high or high school, I tell the kids, ‘Hey, if you are interested in medicine, reach out to me,” he said, “because I will help you as much as I can.”

His 23-year-old son, Kyle, is a firefighter and is pursuing a paramedic degree while his twin sister, Kaye, is studying to be a registered nurse. Allamby’s wife is a physical therapist.

Having started as a businessman, Allamby is having the same approach to medicine having plans to make it a family business.

“I have this big business plan where my son will bring in the patient, I will save their life, and my wife will rehab them, and my daughter will take care of them while they’re in the hospital. And then they’ll get a free oil change on discharge.”

Legit.ng reported the story of a Nigerian makeup artist who recently graduated as a medical doctor despite her love for the beauty business.

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Source: Legit.ng