When BF+DA Research Fellow Russell Joye first started out as a Finance Major/Music minor at Georgetown University in 2004, he had four years to gain the foresight necessary to realize that perhaps success was more than just money. So after he left Georgetown, he started a band with a friend, and took a stab at being a drummer with hopes of being “the next big thing” tucked close under wing. You know, the things we all sort of want to do but never have the guts to follow through on thanks to expectations from parents and society. But though the freedom from music and odd jobs and having a pretty unstructured life was fun, Joye felt his last stab at still being a kid had run its course.

Joye says there were a host of factors at play like his band slowly dissolving because of some bad attitudes and then some curve balls from life.

“My uncle had been diagnosed with Parkinsons years earlier, but my dad was diagnosed around this time in 2010, so that certainly played a significant role. I guess I felt that the impact I could have on the world as a drummer was far less meaningful than what I might be able to do as a healer,” says Joye who decided to start attending the Harvard University Extension School Premed Postbacc Program for the next two years in which he also worked in research in Boston area hospitals simultaneously.

It was in his first semester at Medical University of South Carolina in the fall of 2014, (and just post-Harvard), that he decided to withdraw from school and that things started shifting again.

Read the full story on the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator.