TASTES LIKE HOME
A PLACE TO BELONG BY ELAINE GUREGIAN
W
hen Sofia Mesa thinks of growing up in Colombia, she pictures a small community within the large city of Medellin with family members — lots of them — close by. Her family’s yellow brick apartment building was smack dab in the middle of the group, with her grandma’s building one block away and her dad’s siblings tucked in between. They were together all the time, and they relied on each other. If young Sofia’s parents were busy with work, one of her uncles
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would pitch in to pick her up or watch her. Mesa felt she belonged: “I’d be walking by the preschool and a teacher would call my name and talk to me — 10 years old, not even in the school! You’d run into people you knew everywhere and everyone was willing to help each other.” When Mesa, now a first-year College of Medicine student, moved to Florida with her family in high school, and when she attended a large state school for college (“Go, Gators!” she cheers, reflexively) she missed that sense of a tight-knit community. Then when she looked at medical schools, she saw it at NEOMED. She was in the first cohort of students to graduate in May 2021 with a master’s degree from NEOMED’s new Modern Anatomical Sciences (MAS) program — a one-year program that allows graduates to matriculate directly into the College of Medicine. When the students begin as first-year medicine students, they re-take the anatomy coursework with the other first-year students — with the advantage of having studied it before. With the MAS cohort, Mesa immersed herself in training that put her on a firm footing for medical school. Of the original 14, 13 of the students continued on to the College of Medicine, and they have banded together. “I can really rely on them for pretty much anything. They’re great. We all help each other out. If one of us gets a resource that we think might be helpful to everybody else, we share it. It is a competitive environment, but we’re not competing necessarily with each other. We’re always trying to help each other out,” says Mesa. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m really competitive at game night! Christina (another MAS graduate) hosts game night. Skip-bo (second word rhythms with low) is one of my favorites. It’s a card game that’s so fun, but I never win. Christina always wins!” Mesa admires the service-oriented mission of the Stu-
