There’s no doubt that scholarships make a huge difference for students. My career in academic medicine may have been completely different, if not for a 1, 026-mile trip I took to interview for one in the summer of 1982.
I had been fortunate enough to be accepted to Johns Hopkins for medical school, and having developed personal ties with friends and mentors during undergraduate studies there, I wanted to stay in Baltimore to start my medical education. But how I was going to pay for it cast a cloud over my excitement. I had few options for scholarships and thought loans would be a big part of financing my education.
An advisor told me about the Joanna F. Reed Medical Scholarship, an endowment established to honor Dr. Reed that provided scholarships to Alabama students accepted to private medical schools, based on the student’s academic achievement, financial need, character and potential to be a physician. My roommate and I drove down from Baltimore to Huntsville, where we met my mother to drive us to Brewton, Ala. He and I were two of seven students interviewed for the scholarship, and after the formal process, all of us were told that we would receive scholarship support.
That support for my medical education is a blessing I’m grateful for to this day. The generosity from the Reed family gave me the opportunity to finish medical school with minimal debt and to make decisions about my career based my desire to be an academic surgeon, instead of my ability to pay back student loans.
Last week, the School of Medicine honored donors who contribute to the future of physicians and scientists in Alabama by providing medical student scholarships. The School of Medicine awarded $3.3 million in scholarships to 233 students in the 2015-2016 academic year.
Many of our donors give to supply our community, state and region with compassionate and skilled physicians. Others give to honor the memory of a loved one, to give back to their communities or to encourage students who are underrepresented in medicine.
If you’d like to hear directly from students whose lives were impacted by scholarships, watch the scholarship video on the School of Medicine website.
November 19, 2015