The Caribbean Hustle

As many of you, particularly those who read the little sidebar on here, know I'm a Caribbean medical student. I know, I know, but you're so smart and hard working! (We all are). But you got good grades in college! (Most of us did). Ordinarily, I avoid the topic. I'm proud of where I am in my education but I like to avoid being stigmatized when possible. A typical conversation on the first day of a rotation goes like this:

Other medical person: "What school are you from?"
Me: "AUC"
OMP: "What's that?"
Me: "American University"
OMP: "Oh, where is that?"
Me: "In St Maarten"
OMP: "Where is that?" growing confused and inpatient
Me: "The Caribbean."
OMP: "OH!... ok."

While I could spend hours talking about why it's stupid to stigmatize a whole group of people because their path looks different than yours (ahem, how politically relevant), that is not what this post is about. What it is about is the Caribbean hustle. You see, American students have the benefit of an established institution with a name that means something. They have people all around them doing research, they have their own residency programs, and they have a path sort of already set up for them to take. We don't. We have to be proactive and make our own way. We gotta hustle. (Thanks Lisa Rinna).

All of this is to lead up to a small little story. In April I was rotating with the cardiac consult team and realized "Oh hey, I love cardio" but knew that as 1. a woman 2. A Caribbean student I would be a minority in the field and I needed to set myself up to succeed. Fortunately, the fellow* on the team was also a Caribbean student, and from a less well-recognized school than mine (ya, we ALL do it, you guys at Harvard don't have snobbery market cornered). He was a really helpful person to meet. He told me about research going on at the university and who was in charge of these projects and who was the nicest amongst them, etc etc. So I went home and looked them up. I saw that they took students from UM and that there was a whole little rotation they could do that wasn't open to Caribbean students so I decided "hey, what could it hurt to just e-mail the head of the lab?".

Call it naivety, call it balls,  call it 2 glasses of pinot grigio but I did it. And within 20 minutes, this world-renowned scientist e-mailed me back to set up a meeting. When I tell you I almost peed my pants, I am not. lying. (Don't worry, I didn't!). I seriously believed nothing would come of it because that has been the case so many times. I cannot tell you how many e-mails I've received with a single line saying "we don't take students from your school". The opportunities in the medical world just don't exist for Caribbean students in the same way they do for American students. While we are qualified, driven, and incredibly hard-working; a lot of people can't get over the name of our school. Because of that, we have to make our own opportunities. So that's what I did. And now, I will be a member of the UM Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute. The lab that has shown we can reverse damage from myocardial infarcts, the lab that has almost figured out the cause for eclampsia, a crazy insane lab that I get to be part of. I'm actually squealing.

The reason people "end up" at a Caribbean school is not uniform. But I think we should be proud to be Caribbean students. Everyone told us no and instead of taking it we turned around and made it happen for ourselves. We have to forge our way in a system that begrudgingly tolerates us and we have to be better than everyone around us. Each one of us has to stand out as amazing because if one of us falls, we all fall as a name.