YOUNG SURGEON KEPT HIS EYE ON THE PRIZE

When I was a teenager, I thought I understood the world. My grandmother always told me that education was the best path to success, but of course, I didn’t always listen. Not at first, anyway.

Raised mostly by my grandmother in a poor neighborhood in Fresno, Calif., I attended school on the “good” side of town, where most of my classmates came from upper-middle-class families. Seeing their financial advantages frustrated me. I gave up on my childhood dream, which was to become a doctor. I started ditching school and getting into trouble. No school counselor wanted to touch me with a 10 foot pole.

Because of my rebellious streak, I had to transfer to a high school designed specifically for troubled youth. It was at that school that I met, for the first time, an adult outside my family who believed in me. He was a guidance counselor at the school who took me under his wing, and even looked past the fact that at age 14, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were about to have a baby. With his help, I enrolled in California State University, Fresno after high school.

My undergraduate years were the most challenging of my education. Even with financial assistance, I had to work full time to pay for school and help support my budding family. One semester, when my wife was pregnant with our second child, was especially trying and I was forced to drop out. That was disheartening, but I found the will to return more determined than ever to excel.

And I did. My GPA rose from a 2.5 at the beginning of college to nearly a 4.0 when I graduated. Fresno’s Health Career Opportunities Program really helped prepare me for medical school. I learned which classes to take and other useful information for a pre-med student. I actually got a job with that program toward the end of school—a perfect way to pay the bills while helping others sort through all the medical school prerequisites.

The career opportunities program secured a scholarship for me to take an MCAT® exam review course. The first time I took the test, though, work and other priorities limited how much I could study, and I was disappointed with my results. The second go-round, however, I was able to improve my score. That time, I eliminated all outside distractions, particularly the television. I am convinced that not reaching for that remote control earned me a few crucial extra points.

I entered the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, where I had a very positive experience. For once, due to a combination of scholarships and loans, I didn’t have to work and could focus exclusively on academics. The scholarships meant my student debt was fairly reasonable as well. There were some surprises, though. I went into medical school committed to a cardiology career, but became fascinated by the well-rounded nature of surgery—how these specialists must both understand disease processes and have the acumen to treat them surgically. I made the switch to the scalpel.

Now a first-year surgical intern at Johns Hopkins Hospital, I can offer this piece of advice to those of you interested in medical school: don’t listen when others say you can’t do it. Plenty of people told me that, and look where I am today.