SARATOGA SPRINGS — Amy Esposito worked various jobs after getting her bachelor’s degree and before deciding to go to Albany Medical College.

Her work with post traumatic stress disorder victims in New York City first sparked her interest in how the body works, she said.

For the 32-year-old Guilderland native, the transition back to full-time student was a lot of work. “You can’t do anything else when you’re doing medicine,” she said.

Going back to medical school after having a nine-to-five job and a personal life is particularly difficult, she said.

“If I could make the choice again, I might have started a few years earlier,” said Esposito, who now lives in Albany and will head next to a residency at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.

And yet Esposito was all smiles Thursday at her graduation from Albany Medical College at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, where she and about 200 other people got degrees in medicine and science.

Tiffany Forti-Swindle, also 32, said she’ll enjoy living with her husband again. The two have lived apart — he in Connecticut and she in Delmar — so she could finish medical school.

“You make a lot of personal sacrifices,” she said.

He will move with her to Worcester, Mass., where she’s doing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Forti-Swindle and the rest of the medical graduates will work a grueling year as interns, starting at the bottom of the totem pole once again.

After that year, graduate Luke Day expects to be deployed overseas.

Day is in the Navy, and will spend his residency working in emergency medicine at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. The 28-year-old Boulder, Colo., native said his graduation day felt surreal. “It feels like this is something that’s happening to someone else.”

The guest commencement speaker encouraged graduates to find their calling and pursue it.

Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, a scientist whose research into hormones and cell receptors broke ground for some of today’s common prescription drugs, spoke at the college’s 170th commencement ceremony in the chilly outdoor amphitheater.

Lefkowitz won the 2007 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.

He told graduates that his own calling came twice.

The Bronx native first became a doctor and then a scientist. “From about the third grade on I never had any doubt whatsoever that I was going to be a doctor,” he said.

And early in his medical training, he found he was even more passionate about scientific research. “These are not things one figures out with one’s head, but with one’s heart.”

“I would hope that none of you ever feel hemmed in or confined by choices you made early on.”

Lefkowitz’s research led to drugs for coronary artery disease, asthma and schizophrenia, among other diseases.

He is the James B. Duke professor of medicine and biochemistry at Duke University Medical Center and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

He received an honorary degree, along with Edward Larow, director of the eight-year science, humanities and medicine joint degree program offered by Siena College and Albany Medical College.