Maggie Ning

Like many first-year internal medicine residents, Maggie Ning, MD, is busy. Her in-patient service days are filled with consults, pages, orders, reports, learning cases, rounds, admissions and notes. There are also morning reports, noon conferences and patient visits. Afternoon, in particular, is “great for talking with patients more,” says Maggie, including “updating their families, having family meetings or ‘goals of care’ discussions and talking with consult teams regarding new recommendations.” All the while, she says, “I continue to answer pages and update orders and notes.”

In the evenings, at home, Maggie enjoys catching up with her husband during dinner time and wraps up her days with reading about topics she encountered during her shift. On days she is able to come home by 5:30 or 6 p.m., she goes for a run around campus, hikes at a nearby trail or park, does yoga or tries out new recipes. She also takes ballroom dancing lessons with her husband not only for “great bonding time” and “good exercise” but also “adventure.” Hobbies like these are important to Maggie. Yoga, for example, helps her “focus on the ‘now’ and cultivate inner peace.” And she says travel – watching sunset at a volcanic summit, paying respects at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, visiting the World Expo in Shanghai or exploring the ruins of Chichen Itza – leaves her “amazed with the wonders of the world.”

Hobbies are important for another reason, too: life balance. Maggie says, “Stanford stands for innovation and inspiration to me, and I want to be a part of this culture. I also want to live in a place that is just breathtakingly beautiful with plenty of things to do. Residency is busy, so achieving work-life balance can be a challenge sometimes. I cannot overestimate how important it is to my essential wellbeing as a physician (to avoid burnout) and as a person to live so close to the people I love, the beautiful nature with hiking trails, beaches and wine country and quirky San Francisco just a train ride away.”

Residency is just the beginning, and I am looking forward to a whole lifetime of healing, learning and teaching ahead.

Maggie was born in China and came to the US as a teenager. She grew up mostly in Texas, met her husband there and attended undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin. Maggie initially thought she wanted to be a pharmacist, and so after two years of undergraduate studies, she went to pharmacy school for an additional four years. While in pharmacy school, she decided she wanted to go into medicine. She says, “I would go to pharmacy classes during the day, work as a pharmacist intern at a compounding pharmacy in the evening or weekends and complete prerequisites [for med school] at night.” She stayed in Texas for medical school, earning her MD at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and chose Stanford for residency both because her family moved to the Bay Area and because she wanted a program with ample research opportunity and strong clinical experiences in cardiology and hematology/oncology.

Coming from pharmacy into medicine informs Maggie’s sensibility about her work. She says, “I did not practice as a pharmacist, but I hope that my pharmacy background will help me become a better physician. I certainly am a strong advocate in a multidisciplinary approach to more comprehensive patient centered care.” Besides, Maggie believes in the journey. “It’s just like the road to Hana,” she says, “where it is all about journey not destination. Residency is just the beginning, and I am looking forward to a whole lifetime of healing, learning and teaching ahead.”