Episode 26: zachary Berman

May 4, 2026

INTERVIEW BY Priyana Gera

Edited by Amar Gopal

Where are you from? 

I’m from New Jersey. I love New Jersey.

If I came to visit you in New Jersey, which I would never do because I don't like New Jersey, what's the first thing we would do? 

Well, you wouldn't visit me in New Jersey because my parents don't live there anymore.

That's right. Are they in Vermont? 

Yeah. So, do you want to hear about New Jersey or Vermont?

I want to hear about Vermont because I would never go to New Jersey anyway. 

I'd take you to get apple cider donuts.

Are they fresh apple cider donuts? 

Yeah, they're usually fresh.

Is it close to your house? Is it quite a drive up to the farm? 

Nothing is that close in Vermont, so the minimum time and distance you have to spend in the car to get apple cider donuts is 15 minutes. Which I guess is not so bad. 

Have you had apple cider or donuts up here in Westchester? While apple picking here at the farms? 

I haven't. 🥹

Sad. Are you going to be the first doctor in the family? 

My grandpa's a doctor.

Wait, didn't you say you found a letter or something with his name on it? Or what was that story? 

He published a case series with Churg and Strauss of glomerulonephritic fame.

Whoa, you've got a celebrity in the family. 

The article is called Unilateral Glomerulonephritis. You can look it up, or I can send you a photo. 

Yeah, I'm going to look it up. 

His paper has multiple cases. It’s a case series. Found it. J. Berman. 1976. 

*In case readers are interested: PMID: 988991

So he was in internal medicine? 

Yeah, and he did a fellowship in Nephrology at Einstein.

Okay, you're not going too far from Einstein. 

Yeah. I'll be at Maimonides in Brooklyn.

How do you feel about staying in New York City for residency and pursuing EM? 

Great. That was the goal. I like that in emergency medicine, you get to do a little bit of everything and work with a range of patients from children to adults, including pregnant patients. And also, you get to be a lot more hands on than you are in internal medicine.

What is a hidden talent that you have? 

I can play accordion.

When did you learn that? The accordion? That's an old timey thing. 

In high school or college. You didn't know that?

I did not know that. Does your twin also play the accordion? 

No. He plays the trumpet and piano.

Do you get to play it often? When do you pull out the accordion? 

Not often, but in college I was in an ensemble where I played accordion. There were two or three other accordionists. And the band leader was an accordionist too.

Speaking of three, what is your obsession with cats? I know about three of them. Leo, Arthur, and Stevia. 

The Cellar cat, not stevia.

I prefer Stevia. Why not dogs? 

I like dogs too. I'm a big fan of Oscar. Oscar had to win me over though. I wasn't always a big fan of Oscar.  Once I met him, I realized that he is baby. He's a “bacha.”

*For reference, Oscar is my 5 year old fur child who identifies as a ball of floof. And bacha is the Hindi word for child, which I lovingly refer to him as. 

You remember that word? Oh my gosh. I'm so impressed. I'm glad Oscar won you over, but you don't have a dog. 

I grew up with dogs and cats. My parents have three dogs now. Dan, Daisy, and Oliver. Now, they're 11 years old. They're getting old and they're big dogs too, so they're probably on their way out. My family's had two other dogs that are dead now because they were old.

Rest in peace. Are you gonna adopt Stevia though? 

That's not the cat's name. If she's friendly enough, then we'll probably adopt her. Otherwise, we're just putting her back in the basement.

She wouldn't go to an adoption center? 

The basement still doesn't seem like such a great place for her. If a feral cat is too feral, you can't really... Sometimes they just don't tolerate living with people, so the best thing to do is just put them back where you found them. But if she was on the street, there are other risks. At least she's indoors.

I guess she's safe? Speaking of being out in the wild, camping versus glamping.

Camping, definitely.

What do you have against glamping? 

I don't know. I don't really have anything against glamping, but camping is more cost-effective. And I think it's just part of camping. The whole experience of camping is being able to do things on your own. So if you're just going to go into a tent with a stove and a wood floor and a mattress and a bed, you might as well just book a hotel.

😑 Fair enough. Were you a Boy Scout? 

No.

Okay, so where are all these life wilderness skills coming from? 

Just trips. I remember when I was in, think after eighth grade, I went on a trip through an organization called Outward Bound, which is fairly well known. It was a sailing program in Maine for two weeks. It was a group of maybe 10 to 15 preteens on a maybe up to 20-foot boat with no cabin, just open.

That's terrifying. 

For the entire two weeks, we would just sleep on the boat and spend all day on the boat. No bathroom on the boat. You'd do your business in a bucket at the front of the boat. At night, you'd set up a tent that would cover most of the boat at night using different pieces of the sail, basically, and the masts and spars and things. And every night you would have to spend an hour on watch. So you'd sleep, sort of like a pack of sardines, head to foot. And the watch would just go down the line. So someone would sit at the front of the boat for an hour, probably use the bathroom, because that's when you have the most privacy. And then after an hour was up, they'd just go back to their sleeping spot and wake up the person next to them. So that was probably the first big wilderness experience I had.

Did you end up ever going to that wilderness conference? 

I went to a wilderness medicine conference at UMass. It was pretty good. Basically, just a lot of interesting lectures. It was funny because probably a quarter to a third of the participants were just the rescue squad, the campus EMTs. And they all showed up in their jackets. I didn't get a jacket, but they gave me a notebook.

Are you going to get wilderness certified, maybe after EM? 

I probably won't want to do a wilderness medicine fellowship. I don't know what it would do for me. You can do a lot of wilderness medicine stuff without doing a fellowship. I think you do a wilderness medicine fellowship if you want to run a wilderness medicine program at an academic center or something. But there are a lot of courses you can just take for your own self-improvement. I think there are opportunities to do remote medicine missions to different parts of the country or world. I think that'd be more than enough with hands-on experience. Focus on practical skills.

What would you say is your favorite outdoor activity? 

Running.

What's your favorite trail around here? 

The easiest is just to go to Rockefeller State Park.

You know I still haven't been. 

That's ridiculous. You need to go. I think it's just so accessible from campus and the trails are really nice. The trails are graded gravel so it's very flat and easy.

Do you have a personal best on Strava? Something you try to beat? 

I'm not much of a sprinter. But the app tracks your personal bests for every distance. I feel like I set a lot of my personal bests around a year after I started running seriously and I haven't been able to match those bests, so these days I just focus on consistency. It's one of the bigger challenges to get up and keep doing it.

Considering that I'm moving to Denver and everyone has pointed out that I'm not an outdoor person, what's the first sport I should probably try? 

I already suggested that you go check out the parks in Boulder, it is a fun little city north of Denver and there they have a really nice park called Chautauqua Park. There are these really beautiful, small mountain/rock formations called the Flatirons and people climb up them, but you don't need to climb up them you can hike around them.

What are three words your friends would use to describe you? 

You're my friend.

[both laugh] I am your friend, but that was not the question. What words do you think your friends would use to describe you?

Caring, curious....

It should begin with a c because of the alliteration you have going. 

Let's think of another c. Caring, curious...

I was going to say a bit carefree... 

You think I'm carefree?

Sometimes. It would probably be the first word I use to describe you. 

A bit carefree. Okay, that's good. I'm glad you think that.

Next question, who's your favorite artist? 

Recently, I've been listening to a lot of Fountains of Wayne. It's a punk rock grungy band from the 90s, early 2000s. They had two really good big albums. One of their biggest songs is "Stacy's Mom." I first heard it when I was maybe seven years old. A few years ago, I went back and listened to their full albums. They're from northern New Jersey and a lot of their songs reference things about New Jersey and even Westchester. The first verse line of the song "Little Red Light" by Fountains of Wayne is "sitting in traffic on the Tappan Zee / 50 million people out in front of me." They also have a song called "Hackensack," which is in Bergen County, where I grew up.

Would you consider going back to New Jersey to practice medicine? 

Well, my parents don't live in New Jersey anymore, but a lot of my aunts and uncles and grandparents still live in New Jersey. I don't know. There are some parts of New Jersey that I might live in but I grew up in the suburbs and there are good parts of the suburbs and bad parts. In the town I mainly grew up in, I was able to bike everywhere and go hang out with my friends very easily. When I was in high school, we moved a little farther north near the New York border and the houses were much farther apart and there just wasn't a town center. I found that to be not as nice. It made it harder to socialize and there was nothing to do nearby. 

I think something I didn't really appreciate when I was growing up in Fair Lawn was just how close everything is. I lived next to this park and I used to walk to hang out with my friends at Panera Bread over here. Recently, I went back to visit family, and I went for an 8-mile run from Fair Lawn to Ridgewood. As a kid, I could have conceivably ridden my bike from Fair Lawn to Ridgewood.

What's your longest run? 

I ran a marathon, the Jersey City Marathon two years ago. It was after I took Step One. I stayed in the city the night before.

The only other twin that I have interviewed is Eliana. You're the second set of twins. How was it growing up with a twin? 

It was good. It's nice having someone to do things with. In regard to our different career paths, I think I sort of decided I was going to apply to medical school pretty early on in college. My brother wasn't interested in that. He majored in geology and just finished law school.

What did you major in? 

Biology. I was tempted by some other majors, but I couldn't really see what I would do with them. I considered majoring in international relations, but I didn't really know what an international relations career would look like. I don't think I would want to work for an NGO and I wasn't really interested in going to law school. I find business interesting, but I can just read about it on my own. I read a lot of news these days and if I read a book, it's usually history or culture.

What's the most recent history book you've read? 

"The Social Transformation of American Medicine" by Paul Starr. It looks at the history of medicine in America through a sociological lens. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.

What was your takeaway from it? 

It's interesting. It's interesting to see how issues they were dealing with in medicine in the 1800s we are still dealing with today. It also explores the relationship between the institution of medicine and the general public. People's perceptions of medicine are surprisingly unchanged; people are distrustful of medicine and experts in the same way today as they did in the 1800s. People have always explored alternatives. Physicians have always needed to work really hard to gain the trust of the public.

What kind of doctor do you see yourself being? 

Something I like about emergency medicine is that it is team-oriented. So I want to always reinforce that when working. Nothing happens in the hospital because one person did something. It's always the result of a lot of people working together. And as a trainee, it's hard to internalize sometimes that we're supposed to be the leaders of the team. Even as a resident, you should be the leader of your team. Go talk to the nurse and connect with them about the patient you're both taking care of. Make sure they know who you are. Talk to the nutritionist and coordinate care.

Any post-graduation plans before residency starts? 

I'm going to Israel for 10 days. I'm leading a birthright trip. Birthright is a program that gives Jewish people all over the world the opportunity to travel to Israel and connect with their Jewish identity.

Have you done one of these before? 

I went on one before starting medical school. It was good. I had been to Israel many times before going on Birthright. I lived there for two years as a kid, so it wasn't really such a new experience for me. But I always enjoyed traveling there and visiting family. It was nice to meet other people my age. And then after graduation, I'm going to Iceland for a week.

OMG. I went to Iceland three years ago for a week. I stayed in a hotel in Reykjavik. The food was amazing. 

Any recommendations? 

You have to go to Blue Lagoon. 

I'm going to a different spa because I heard the Blue Lagoon gets too crowded. But I booked a spa, don't worry. We're spending four days in Reykjavik and three days on the south coast.

You are going to have so much fun! Last question, any advice for future M1s? 

Start studying for step one early. Make sure to prioritize non-medical school things. Visit your family and exercise. Especially during M1 and M2; you have more free time than you think you do. Get outside as much as you can. Cook your own meals. Don't rule out any specialties before your third year. Find opportunities to shadow in many different specialties when you're in M1 and M2. I did not do this and I wish I did. Keep in touch with mentors.

Contact Zach at zberman2@student.nymc.edu.

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