Benedikt’s Background
If you are reading this, you made it to the first personal reflections post. As the name suggests, this page is for documenting struggles I’ve faced, things I’ve been doing that don’t fall into the other categories of this website, or really anything else I feel the need to jot down. Before I do that though, you should at least get to know and idea of who Benedikt Maximilian (… I think I spelled it right this time) Winzer is.
Picture of Vienna, Austria, my family’s home.
Like anyone else’s story, mine starts with my parents. Both of my parents were born and raised in Vienna, Austria, and moved to the United States when my dad found a promising (and at the time, temporary….) job as a fiber optics researcher at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. However, witnessing the attacks of 9/11 from a highway made my parents decide to move back home, and that’s when I came into the world. I was born in Vienna on March 11, 2002, at 8:45 PM.
A picture of me from the first year of life.
Bell Labs was too promising of an opportunity for a young engineer to turn down, so the Winzer family moved back to the US pretty much within a year of my birth. I don’t remember much from the early years, but I do remember deciding that I wanted to play the violin, probably one of the most important decisions I made in my life. It began with a show I would watch all the time, called “The Little Einsteins.” The show aimed to expose kids to classical music and instruments in an engaging way. When I was watching the show one day, one of the main characters, Quincy, played the violin, and I’m told that I would not shut up about starting violin lessons after that.
“Little Einsteins” theme song.
My parents initially brushed it off, because any parent knows that kids want new things that fade all the time (admittedly I had my fair share of those: a Transformers phase, a Car's phase, a Legos phase, a “Thomas the Tank Engine” phase, etc.). But I kept persisting, and that’s when they took me to my first violin lessons in Red Bank, New Jersey.
Early violin playing, with my snazzy lightsaber themed violin bow.
Around the same time, I had a similar situation with ice hockey. My parents tell me that for some reason I was willing to do anything to play hockey, and I couldn’t even skate yet. My parents signed me up for a “learn to skate'' program (shoutout to Coach Kevin), and every week I would take lessons at the local arena until I was good enough to make it into gear. While I started out as a normal forward, I soon realized that I wanted to be the goalie, because the thought of being hit with dense rubber discs all day long was just so thrilling to me. The actual reason is because I copied my older sister… BUT I initially inspired her and my younger brother to start playing hockey too, so tit for tat.
I often forget this because it was so long ago, but hockey was a huge part of my life up until I quit in middle school. Not only did I have practices and games all the time, but my family and I would travel to tournaments all over the Northeast several times a year. It got so serious towards the end that I made the cut of the AA travel team for the New Jersey Titans, but that was my last season: between hockey being an expensive endeavor, the uncomfortable cultural mismatch resulting from me being an out of place immigrant with parents who couldn’t relate with anyone (mostly because they didn’t care the slightest bit about any mainstream professional sports), and the toxic culture of hockey moms and dads kissing up to coaches to get their kids to play more minutes, I had to quit.
In the meantime, things were moving places with the violining. My “American Grandma” Ellen Krupa (one of my family’s dearest friends who has acted as a major support for us since we moved overseas) learned about my musical endeavors and through one of her closest friends got me an opportunity to play for Yevgeny Kutik, an up and coming concert violinist. I played for Yevgeny in Massachusetts and while I wasn’t all that great, he saw potential in me and recommended that I go study with Elizabeth Faidley if I wanted to step up my game to the next level. She’s a really established violin teacher now, but at the time she was just a friend of Yevgeny’s who was starting to make a name for herself as an up and coming violin teacher in the New York City area.
My parents took the bet on me, and invested pretty much as much as one could into my music education, a commitment I am grateful for every day. If you aren’t familiar with that world, it’s ridiculous how much serious music education costs, both in time and money: every single week year-round, my dad would drive me an hour to and from Fort Lee in New Jersey and would wait an hour for me to finish my lesson before forking over upwards of $100 for Ms. Faidley’s time. If I was playing with a piano accompanist, add another $100. If I was recording at a professional studio to participate in a competition or if I won the opportunity to play in Carnegie Hall, $500 please.
Elizabeth Faidley and me at a studio recital. For those unfamiliar with classical music practices, it’s typical for teachers to host 1-2 concerts every year for students to show their progress and to practice performing in front of an audience. This is typically manifested as a Holiday/New Years Concert and/or a Spring/Mother’s Day Concert
Despite the expenses of being a serious young violinist, things were great in the beginning! Over the course of the next few years I started to become much more technically advanced, started winning solo violin competitions, and was going to music festivals practically every summer.
However, I lost the joy in making music over time. Everything was only about the technical aspects of violin performance and I was genuinely starting to have mental health issues that would flare out when I couldn’t be perfectly in tune during practice at home and performances for others. It sounds silly, but my life was really about getting to the next most difficult violin piece rather than sharing music with other people who I could genuinely have an impact on. Admittedly you can see it in my face from recordings of my playing from that time… I look miserable.
One of my recorded performaces from my time studying under Elizabeth Faidley. This particular one is a Sonatina from Dvorak. I used this reording to apply for Colburn School of Music in LA when my dad got offered a professorship at a college in California, but things didn’t work out on my end or his.
By the time 8th grade rolled around, I was starting to feel out of place in Ms. Faidley’s studio, and my parents decided that it was time to transition to another teacher. This was also perfect timing, because at this point I was preparing to audition for Saturday-school pre-college programs in New York City, including the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes Prep (part of the New School). After my Mannes Prep audition, one of the judges came up to me and said something like “I’ve never heard anyone play scales with such musicality… do you want to be my student?” It was super weird, but my parents really appreciated that someone cared about my musical potential rather than the technical perfection, even if it was for something as trivial as scales. That man was Khullip Jeung, and he became my violin teacher at Mannes Prep until the end of high school.
Me, Khullip Jeung (left), and Heejin Kim (right), the most awesome piano accompanist, after a studio recital at NV Factory in Englewood, NJ. The food that they had at these studio recitals made me realize that no one has lived until they have had authentic Korean food.
Weaved in throughout the musical and sports-related activities was my love for medical topics. I don’t know how I came out of the womb with the determination I had, but when I was a little kid I could not stop looking at medically related things. I even asked my mom if we had shovels so we could look at bones in a graveyard before I knew the significance of that statement.
While I was pretty interested in the content already, the moment I actually fell in love with medicine was when my dad took me to a Body Worlds exhibit in New York City. Body Worlds is an exhibit where donor cadavers are dissected, posed to show real life or symbolic situations, and preserved using a process called “plastination.” While it may be unsettling to some, as soon as I was walking through the exhibit I got absolutely lost. I’ll never forget the first thing that I saw: a plastinated person holding all of their skin up in one hand, emphasizing the importance of the integumentary system. Call me weird, but every piece in that exhibition hall was mesmerizing to observe and learn about. Future Ben here: having now completely dissected a donor in anatomy lab during my first semester of medical school, I have a new appreciation for those who donated their bodies to these exhibits, and I could not be more grateful to those individuals for allowing me to explore my interest in medince through their gifts.
Besides wanting to read medical books and go to Body Worlds exhibits, my interest in medicine didn’t have any structured expression until the end of middle school, when I applied to attend a vocational school focused on health sciences. My county in New Jersey had a weird vocational school district system with five selective public schools each aiming to provide focused education in a specific area. There was one for general technology, one for biomedical technology, one for marine sciences, one for media and art, and one for medical sciences. I applied for that last one, the Academy of Allied Health and Science, and somehow squeaked in with a subpar score on the entrance exam.
A lot happened during high school. In the music sector, violin started to be more fun because I started making friends at Mannes and because Mr. Jeung was more focused on musicality. Unfortunately, a lot of the mental health damage was already done with regards to being overcritical of my playing: at almost every concert I would race off the stage and I would be bitter with anyone who complimented me on my performances because I didn’t agree with them.
The turning point came when I cracked my violin by tossing it onto a bed while practicing, which was one of the most embarassing moments of my life. Although I did not intend to damage my instrument, enough was enough. I needed to figure out what was wrong with my mental health. Over time I learned how to take compliments about my playing and love to make music for others, but it took years.
Towards the end of high school, I gave performing for senior citizens another shot and organized a concert at the same assisted living facility I had played at a few years prior. But this time the focus was on making music that people could enjoy. It worked: I was not technically perfect, but the people loved it because I was having so much fun up on the stage. This is when I truly realized that technical ability is the medium through which love for music can be shared.
In the meantime, I was also exploring other areas of music which gave me the freedom to enjoy the music rather than be obsessed technique, and so I started getting into electronic music production during my junior year of high school (DJ Berk, you know who you are - if you ever read this, please know you inspired me to start producing music). I started exploring alternative ways to make music, and it gave me some of the most fun I’ve had in my life.
An experimentation with mixing classical music with hip-hop. Here I am playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
In the academic sector, high school was a period of immense growth. I worked really hard to get the highest grades, and even became a finalist in a national medical terminology compitition as a senior. I also obtained my EMT certification, served as a volunteer for my local EMS squad, and shadowed a ton in neurosurgery, all of which was so incredible that I couldn’t see myself doing anything else but being a doctor.
At the end of the day, I ended up being blessed to be offered a spot at Stanford and the REMS program at the University of Rochester when college admissions were said and done. Knowing I wanted to be a doctor (well, as much as an 18 year old could know…), REMS was the right choice for me, and so I was headed to Rochester for the next 8 years. A lot of people thought I was crazy for doing that, but now that I’m 4 years deep I can assure you it was the right decision in every way.
Rush Rhees library at the University of Rochester during the warm and sunny winters :)
Once in Rochester, I faced a whole new set of challenges. High school had prepared me to do really well in school, but I wasn’t about to take my conditional medical school acceptance for granted and coast my way through undergrad: I decided to push myself and pursue a biomedical engineering degree. I also pursued computational neuroscience research, which I’m still continuing to this day.
On the flip side of things, I went through a period of immense personal growth which addressed the lack of self-confidence I had coming into school. During my first year of college, which also included the lovely COVID-19 pandemic, I had some pretty rude awakenings when it came to leaning on others to lift me up, and it gave me the opportunity to learn to love myself in a way I had never done before (finding the gym made that process so much easier too). Additionally, after shooting my shot at the school orchestra, I realized that I needed some space from classical music and ended up becoming much more involved in electronic music production and DJing, which gave me so much happiness when I wasn’t doing work for school.
Some other really important things happened during college, like meeting Tiana, my lovely girlfriend of over two years, but this sums it up pretty well when it comes to key personal moments. I loved college, and while the time has come for me to say goodbye to late morning wakeups and having the time to cook for myself each and every night, I can move forward knowing how much I’ve grown since I stepped on campus almost 4 years ago.
While that was a brief overview of my story, this brings us to today, where I am just about to start medical school and begin the next chapter of my life. If you made it to the end here thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to sharing more with you!
