Spotlight: Stephanie Delma

Stephanie Delma

When Stephanie Delma was 6 years old, she experienced unimaginable trauma. Her mother became the victim of gun violence, shot in the hip and jaw in a failed criminal conspiracy to collect insurance money. “She was a single mom, my only guardian,” Stephanie said. “It was very scary. I talk about it a lot because of how much it shaped me.” As her mother recovered, Ms. Delma felt less fear and more curiosity. “I distinctly remember one conversation I had with one of my mother’s doctors,” she said. “He told me, ‘We took bone from her hip and used it to fix her mouth.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wow! You can do that with bones?’ That’s when I started telling people I wanted to be a ‘bone doctor.’ I thought it was fascinating that you can use parts of your body to repair other parts.” Ms. Delma hasn’t strayed from that path she set herself on in the first grade. She double majored in biology and communications at Boston College and, because she devoted a great deal of time to the communications major, she went on to the Postbaccalaureate Program at Elms College in Chicopee, Mass., to complete the necessary prerequisites for medical school. Elms posted a list of places where its graduates had been successful medical school applicants. One of the schools was Geisinger Commonwealth. “The moment I stepped on Geisinger’s campus, I felt I was home,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘I hope they accept me.’ It was my favorite interview. Everybody was so kind and didn’t shy away from my questions about inclusivity. I asked, ‘How do you promote diversity?’ and I received a long list of activities — which I then got involved in as a student.” Between her second and third years, Ms. Delma opted to take a gap year to do research and hone her residency application. “I was an upper extremity research fellow at Geisinger’s Musculoskeletal Institute with Dr. (Louis C.) Grandizio. It was awesome. I was also involved in resident didactic sessions and went to cadaver labs for shoulder and elbow replacements. I thought, ‘I’m not even a thirdyear and I am doing these things!’ It was the best experience I have had so far in my medical career and makes me want to stay here even more.”