Starla Graber '85

Elkhart, Ind.
Major at GC: Nursing
Postgraduate education: M.D. from Indiana University

Graber thought she did not want to be a small-town doctor, like her father, but as her nursing career developed, colleagues during voluntary service in Boston, Mass., at Tufts University, and at an Indianapolis hospital kept pushing her to apply for medical school.
“In my heart of hearts, I knew I probably wouldn’t stay in nursing. I was more interested in why and how, I liked the hands-on medicine,” she said.

Graber returned to Goshen to finish her pre-med prerequisites, then moved with her husband, Harley Yoder ’85, to Indianapolis for her schooling and his residency. Now both are Elkhart doctors – Graber an obstetrician/ gynecologist for River Oaks OB/GYN Associates and Yoder a family practitioner at Concord Family Medicine.

Graber said her doctoral decision made a nurse cousin irate: “She said, ‘How can you join the enemy? You are defecting!’ I said, ‘I am not, I am infiltrating.’ GC professors taught me things in nursing that are part of who I am as a doctor. ...You can’t do it if your heart isn’t in it. It takes too much of your soul.”