This made him stay in the books and thrive in school. It was sometimes hard to do this because he went to a predominantly all white school. Teachers would berate the white students for letting a black man getting ahead of them academically. When he got to South Western High school, his teachers would mentor him and keep him on track because they saw the potential in him. He graduated with honors. He then started looking for summer jobs. With those jobs and a scholarship, he attended Yale and earned a B.A in psychology. He graduated Yale in 1973 and enrolled in school of medicine at the University of Michigan to become a neurosurgeon. In 1975 he married Lacrena “ Candy” Rustin whom he met at Yale. They moved to Baltimore and he became a resident at John Hopkins University in 1977. In 1982 he became the chief resident in neurosurgery at John Hopkins. He volunteered to go to Australia because of the lack of doctors over there. When he came back , he went to Africa to separate twins. Though the surgery was unsuccessful, he continued to do procedures. In 1997, he attempted to separate another set of twins in Zambia. It was a 28 hour surgery and it was