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Former college player of the year and Epson Tour pro chooses medical school over golf
Natalie Srinivasan hits a tee shot during the final round of the inaugural Augusta National Women's Amateur in 2019.
David Cannon
Natalie Srinivasan is a hell of a golfer. The Furman great hailing from South Carolina won the 2020 Annika Award (given annually to the top female collegiate golfer), finished out the 2022 season on the Epson Tour and will now be heading to medical school. Wait … what?
You heard that right. Sounds like Srinivasan is quite the double threat as she was recently accepted into the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine. “When I started to lose that mind control, that’s when I knew I couldn’t do this,” Srinivasan told Golfweek about the decision to leave the sport. “The passion wasn’t there.”
It took some time to come to grips with the career change, but the 20-something said that she wanted to play for something bigger than herself. This backup plan seems to be exactly that.
If Srinivasan ever wants to hit the course and discuss the quaternary structure of a protein, she certainly has two names at her disposal: August Kim and Janet Mao. These are two other former golf pros that made the jump from getting a round in to making rounds.
Kim is a former Big Ten conference champion who played for Purdue, and she was already named president of her class at Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Mao, on the other hand, is at Emory after putting the clubs down despite winning NCAA regionals back in 2016.
It’s an impressive switch and these are but a few individuals who have the chance to say that they were featured in both Golf Digest and medical journals. That’s certainly not the case for most of us on staff. Unless we were the ones being analyzed.