For Nigerian immigrant Osa Gubadia, 28, meeting Dr. Lynne Holden, who three years ago spoke at his college about the process of applying to medical school, was something of a Godsend.
“She gave me so much good advice,” said the college graduate who came to the U.S. determined to become a medical doctor and is now applying to medical school under Holden’s mentorship.
An emergency medicine doctor at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr.Holden has allowed students of color like Gubadia to shadow her while she’s in action, giving them first-hand exposure to the profession.
Speaking of what drives her to serve as a mentor to students, Holden, also a professor at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said, “In my travels, I didn’t see that many minority physicians or heath care providers.” Despairing at news of federal budget cuts to programs directed at increasing students of color in medicine, Dr. Holden took matters into her own hands and after nearly eight years of informally mentoring students of color, founded the Mentoring in Medicine. The organization is currently working on attaining non-profit status. Last Saturday at Harlem’s Alhambra Ballroom, the organization hosted its first major event. Called Dining with Doctors, the event hosted 130 students of color in grades 4 and up who are interested in medicine to have dinner with established doctors of color.
“The idea was to provide students of color the opportunity to network with physicians,” said Holden, who drew 60 physicians to the event from a variety of specialties, including podiatry, dentistry, obstetrics and anesthesiology. Although the bulk of students enrolled in Holden’s mentoring program are undergraduates who need guidance applying to medical school, the organization, which operates in Harlem, the South Bronx and Oakland, Calif., is quickly integrating programs that target younger students.
An after-school program run in conjunction with the Harlem Council of Elders regularly invites health care providers to inform students about illnesses that disproportionately affect communities of color. Other programs the organization will host for younger students are an annual educational seminar, a scientific/ health fair and a science sleep-away summer camp. Students interested in medicine, but who don’t want to become physicians are welcome to join.
“It’s a broad-based program…it’s not narrow[ed] to med school alone,” said Gubadia, now in the process of applying to medical school. “[It] is valuable to other health care professions,” he added.
For Mentoring in Medicine participant Carina Lopez, a 25-year-old New York University graduate in her first year at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, the program has been “dynamic.” Before Lopez met Dr. Holden two years ago, the aspiring physician said she had “never seen a physician of color.” “It [Mentoring in Medicine] showed me that there were other physicians of color very involved in the community,” said Lopez. Though still disheartened by the fact that she’s the only Puerto Rican in her school’s first-year class of 180 students, Lopez is all the more is grateful for the emotional and academic support Mentoring in Medicine provides. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful experience,” she said. |
