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Last weekend, I attended the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) National and West Regional Conference. Last year, I had the pleasure of attending the LMSA Northeast Regional Conference at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx, and well, in person! My senior year of college, I noticed a lack of Latino pre-med students on campus. I knew we were there, and having struggled in my pre-med classes as a first-generation college student, I wanted to create some sort of solidarity in my small but mighty community. I had heard about LMSA before and when I received an email that they were now opening undergrad chapters, I immediately began working towards starting a chapter at Princeton.
For weeks, I worked to make this happen. I got signatures for a petition, met with officers from the Undergraduate Student Government and sent emails to officers at LMSA. In October of 2019, the club was official! I remember smiling as I walked out of the Office of Undergraduate Studies, official paperwork in hand! After a few months, thirty new members, three new officers, and lots of fundraising efforts, ten of us packed our bags and embarked on a trip to the LMSA Northeast Regional Conference!
I had a blast at the conference. While I learned much about MCAT preparation, the complexity of treating undocumented patients, and how to finance medical school, the main message I took away was something I was in desperate need of: inspiration. My freshman and sophomore years of college, I really struggled. I simply did not have the tools to excel in Princeton’s rigorous pre-med courses. I felt horrible about myself and seeing a lack of people with my similar background in medicine in addition to this “failure”, I thought it was a sign to give up. I thought people like me didn’t go into medicine. Attending the LMSA Conference in 2020 and seeing so many medical students and physicians share similar stories to mine or look like me...it was just what I needed to keep going and apply to post-bac programs.
Upon getting back to campus, I wrote an angry article discussing how many people, including other Latinos and even physicians, had made me feel inferior because of my background as a Latina or told me my accomplishments were only because of affirmative action. But yet, here I had witnessed countless Latinos repping their white coats and boasting their published research at this conference. I wanted those people to know they were wrong. I never published the article of course but I just needed to get it out. “I DO BELONG IN MEDICINE!” I wanted to scream.
Fast forward a year to last weekend when I attended my second LMSA conference virtually. Again, I took away helpful pre-med information, even forming connections with some medical schools and students, and I was also left feeling inspired by physician speakers and medical students sharing their journeys in medicine. I attended one workshop about FQHCs (Federally Qualified Health Centers) to understand how I can work with underserved patient populations, and the doctor who spoke at the workshop was utterly inspiring. “I go to bed happy every day because I know I’ve made a difference in my patients’ lives,” he said. This reminded me of when I met a disgruntled physician in 2019 who upon hearing I wanted to be a doctor told me, “Have fun throwing your life away!” I obviously laughed when he said this because let’s be honest, this was straight out of a movie. But the reality is that this doctor is not happy in medicine. To then hear another physician say he goes to bed happy because of the impact he’s making in his patient’s lives, wow, what a difference!
While the first time I attended the LMSA conference I was overwhelmed by the large amount of Latino medical students and physicians conglomerated in one location, this time I was left feeling quite the opposite. Don’t get me wrong, there were way more people at this conference than at the last, but what still shocks me is how few of us there are. At the conference, I was reminded that of all the American medical schools (154 M.D. programs and 38 D.O. programs), there are only four Latino deans, three of which are the deans of Puerto Rican medical schools. At the LMSA Gala, a physician sought to recruit Latinx orthopedic surgeons. He is the ONLY Hispanic orthopedic surgeon as a department head in the country. The keynote speaker spoke on the last day of the conference and he mentioned attending a UC in the 70s and having to transfer because he felt so isolated as the only Latino in his class. While I was certainly not the only Latina in my class at Princeton, I was typically the only Hispanic (sometimes even the only under-represented minority student) in my classes. How is it that 50 years later, not much has changed?
One of the workshops I attended last weekend deeply moved me. This feeling of isolation and disbelief at the lack of change in representation was put into statistics. It was startling to see how much medicine has grown since the 1970s, but how little it’s changed for underrepresented minorities in medicine (Black, Latino, Indigenous people). The numbers don’t lie and the numbers actually indicate there are fewer of us in medicine than in the 70s. During this workshop, we also discussed how often we take being belittled with a grain of salt. As underprivileged communities, we’re used to it. For example, we’re used to comparing the financial earnings of minority subgroups to White males. We’re used to trying to understand why a Latina makes 54 cents for every $1 that a White man makes for the same work, but never the only way around. It’s completely normalized in our society to accept that White men deserve to earn that $1.
Additionally, the physician brought up the ideas of equity and equality. “What’s the difference?,” he asked. He shared an image many of us had seen before, showing three people: one short, one medium sized, and one tall. Only the tall person can see over the fence and watch the baseball game happening. Equality, he explained is giving each person a stool. With the stool, the tall person can now see better, the medium person can now see the game, but the small person still can not. Equity is different. It offers equal outcomes instead of equal opportunities. It’s giving a taller stool to a shorter person so everyone is the same height. Before this workshop, I was familiar with this image and I’ve never questioned it. It makes sense. But the physician then challenged us to think about these images. “These drawings are often used to express privileged populations versus underprivileged ones, but I’m not short, so why is someone short representing me?” What he meant was, why are we used to portraying some populations as “short” when the reality is they are tall, they are just exploited and oppressed, disabling them from seeing over the fence. He showed us a more accurate image, with one person, representing the privileged community, is standing on a stool and is able to see over the fence, another person is in a hole, and still another person is chained up and unable to stand.
This image is the reality of being a minority in medicine and is why there are so few Latino physicians, PAs, nurses, etc. We aren’t short, but we’re held to the same standards and pre-requisites as privileged applicants so we have to work harder to see over the fence, to get over the fence. The LMSA Conference has encouraged me to not only keep working towards my goal of becoming a doctor, but realizing that by simply being in the room, I am making a difference. I’m fighting tooth and nail for a path others have taken for granted. I cannot be so hard on myself. I am undoing generations of stolen labor and time and when I get over the fence, I’m coming back to unchain my raza and fill every hole I can.