TASTES LIKE HOME

A PLACE TO BELONG

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

When So a 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. ey were together all the time, and they relied on each other. If young So a’s parents were busy with work, one of her uncles 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 rst-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, re exively) she missed that sense of a tight-knit community. en when she looked at medical schools, she saw it at NEOMED. She was in the rst 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 rst-year medicine students, they re-take the anatomy coursework with the other rst-year students — with the advantage of having studied it before. With the MAS cohort, Mesa immersed herself in training that put her on a rm 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. ey’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-

dent-Run Free Clinic at NEOMED, where she hopes to become one of the many medicine and pharmacy students to work with underserved community members. She also likes the tradition of NEOMED students volunteering at the nearby Hartville Migrant Ministry Medical Clinic, overseen by medical director Teresa Wurst, M.D. (’93). e Medical Clinic serves the migrant and seasonal workers — many of them Latinx — who work on the farms.

Mentorship has come from classmates and alumni like Carmen Javier (’21), the founder of NEOMED’s chapter of the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA). Mesa calls Dr. Javier “super helpful.” For example, she says, “My uncle is an anesthesiologist in Colombia. He kept wanting me to go do some rotations there and Carmen told me you actually can do rotations abroad, with a sponsor.” is fall, Mesa and a classmate in LMSA organized a Latin America Travel Fair with activities and foods from various Latin countries. Mesa lets on that her favorite comfort food is white rice with black beans and plantains — sometimes called green bananas — which come in two varieties: the harder, greener kind or the sweeter, softer yellow kind.

“My family isn’t very kitchen-oriented,” Mesa jokes. Not only does she not have a favorite recipe; she claims that she really doesn’t know how to season or cook these dishes. at’s fair. Let’s just say we’ve heard it’s possible to wrap a yellow plantain in aluminum foil and bake it in the oven for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

Make it yourself, and maybe share some with others to stretch their community a little wider, too.

First-year College of Medicine student Sofi a Mesa