“Ever since I was a little girl, I’d been professing that I...

“Ever since I was a little girl, I’d been professing that I wanted to be a doctor. But there weren’t any doctors in my family.  And we didn’t live in the nicest part of Brooklyn, so there weren’t even any doctors in my neighborhood.  I was fourteen years old when I met my first African American female physician, Dr. Cambridge.  It was just a fluke.  I needed to see a doctor, and I ended up at her office.  But meeting her was like God saying: ‘You can do this.  This is what you want, and it’s going to happen.’  It wasn’t easy.  All through school I worked the closing shift at McDonald’s.  I barely had time to study. I failed general chemistry during my freshman year, and my advisor told me that I shouldn’t pursue medicine.  But people had been telling me that my entire life.  So I just never went back to her office.  I figured everything out on my own.  I’d never even heard of an MCAT.  I had to learn all that on my own.  I studied with old books that people donated to me.  But I was still working twenty hours a week, so I only scored in the 19th percentile.  I applied to fifteen medical schools and all of them rejected me.  That’s when the depression set in.  I’d lost $2200 on the applications alone.  But I pulled myself together.  I kept going.  I enrolled in a Master’s program so I could prove that I was capable of succeeding on a higher level.  I took out student loans.  And for the first time, I was able to focus on my schoolwork instead of surviving.  I went into beast mode.  I was like a machine.  I made my first ‘A’ ever in a higher education course.  And the next time I took the MCAT, I scored in the 73rd percentile.  When those results came in, I was laying on the floor.  I was crying.  Because nobody knew how hard I prayed for this.  How hard I worked for this.  So hard.  So, so hard.  Only I knew.  I did this all by myself.”
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