humansofnewyork: “Ever since I was a little girl, I’d been professing that I wanted to be a doctor.
humansofnewyork: “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.” #quarantinestories -- source link