Mission to Med School

“Tales of Excellence, Achievement and Mentorship” or “TEAM” is a weekly series partnered with StudentMentor.org where we feature college students and young Americans from diverse backgrounds across the country who are using mentorships to move their career and educational goals forward. You will hear in their own words how mentors have helped them succeed and transform into the leaders of tomorrow.

Through StudentMentor.org, college students can conveniently find and collaborate with mentors to successfully graduate from college and embark on their desired careers.

Sherita knew her career goal was to become a physician. The challenge was navigating her way through undergraduate classes and then medical school admissions to get on track to make that goal a reality. With the help of several mentors with advice on different things from financial aid to med school admissions exams Sherita is on her way to achieving her goal with more confidence than she could have ever imagined.

My name is Sherita Black and I am a junior majoring in Biological Science. My educational goal is to get a MD. My career goal is to become a physician. With this I hope to use my skills as a physician to help provide medical care where it is not readily available within the US as well as abroad.

One challenge I have faced while going to school has been being the first in my family to go to college. I’ve been able to navigate through my undergrad; however, I thought that I needed more hands on guidance when it came to medical school admissions. The only people who I know that are in college are around my age, so I needed help connecting with people who were ahead of me since I was clueless to what I need to do to get to the next step of getting into medical school. My second challenge has been financial. My immediate family consists of my mother and myself, and from my senior year of high school until recently my mother has been unemployed. I found it difficult to cope with the changes of being a full-time college student, and worrying about the uncertainty of what was going to happen in the days to come.

Smoothing the Transition

Hernán Luis y Prado is being recognized as a Champion of Change for his dedication to service and his continued support for efforts to boost employment for fellow veterans.

Transitioning from military service to civilian life can be challenging in the best of times. For the estimated two million veterans who served a tour -- or multiple tours -- of duty in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are even more hurdles than usual. Chief among them is the economy, which has helped drive the jobless rate amongst those veterans to more than 12 percent in 2011-- well above the rate of the general population. It's even worse for veterans between 18 and 34 years old; their jobless rate neared 30 percent in 2011. Other factors that come into play include medical advances that are resulting in greater survivability on the battlefield -- and more “Wounded Warriors” (severely injured service members) returning home.

I made a commitment to myself on the night I ran into a young marine, John, who had served with me in Iraq. He had nothing when he came back. He had a young bride-to-be and was waiting at a Navy medical center to transition home. Every week they would tell him he was going home the following week . . . this went on for months and months. It was incredibly painful and stressful on him. For people like John, it can be awful to go from knowing where the danger is to having complete uncertainty over your future, not knowing if the service is going to keep you or not, not knowing what you are transitioning to, and knowing you are unprepared. It was a tremendous ordeal for John and he handled it well -- but many of our other friends in similar situations committed suicide. I knew there had to be a better way. At first, I opened my house, garage and back yard to friends so they could come over during their medical rehabilitations and work with my metal fabrication and woodworking tools.

Helping Survive the Peace

Bob Curry is being recognized as a Champion of Change for his dedication to service and his continued support for efforts to: end homelessness, boost employment and treat mental health disparities for fellow veterans.

In 2003, while I sat with other Vietnam veterans in the waiting room at the VA for a PTSD group to begin, we found ourselves fixated on the televisions in the room. The screens, filled with images of a younger generation at war in Afghanistan and building up for an invasion of Iraq, made us re-experience the same tension of going into battle that this newest generation of warriors a half a world away were facing. We agreed this newest generation of warriors deserved better then we received, and we needed to do something about it.We had become a generation who lost over fifty thousand to combat, three times that number to suicide after the war’s end, and over ½ million veterans who became incarcerated years after our war. There are thousands of broken families, relationships, and addictions that become reality for the service men and women who returned. You’ll begin to see the true human cost of war that families and their communities, our communities, will forever bear. I knew these younger brothers and sisters fighting our newest wars who made it home would face a similar path, a path strewn with unseen, unanticipated, and unexplored challenges that would take more lives than the wars themselves unless action was taken.