Cindy Parra may only be a first-year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College, but she's pretty sure of the kind of medicine she wants to practice — at the very least, the patient population she wants to treat.
Parra, 27, of San Diego, Calif., immigrated with her family to the United States from Colombia when she was just a toddler. She knows what it's like when cultural nuances get lost in the health care translation.
The oldest of three children, Parra was 16-years-old when her brother was born. Her mother was 45 years old, and had a difficult pregnancy. When things were toughest, it was her mother's doctor who helped her family through it. It was her mother's doctor who explained what was happening to her body and to her baby in a way that cut through cultural differences.
"At that moment," Parra said, "that's when I realized that I not only wanted to be a doctor, but that I also wanted to work with Hispanic populations as well."
Parra is keeping a keen eye on obstetrics and gynecology, but she's keeping an open mind. But what she's settled on is her role in raising awareness for health care and improving care for Hispanics.
Her work with the San Ysidro Health Center in southern California after college cemented that drive in her. She helped open a clinic that extended reproductive health services to teens, in a population that was largely Hispanic immigrants of low socioeconomic status.
"I got to shadow doctors who spoke with patients about birth control, sexual histories," she said. "It's a very sensitive topic, and it's really taboo in our society, even though we see it in the news and in music. Everything is sexualized, but when it comes to health and how to protect yourself, it's not talked about. And that's even more the case in the Hispanic culture, where the majority are Catholic or Christian. There are multiple layers of complexity within this one area of reproductive health, so it's important to have someone they can trust."
With this plan in place, she found Weill Cornell to be the best place to prepare for that future. It's a school she knew very well. While at college at Columbia University, she was accepted into the Tri-Institutional M.D.-Ph.D. Program's Gateways to the Laboratory Program, which is a summer program for underrepresented minority and disadvantaged college students who wish to pursue the combined M.D.-Ph.D. degree.
That experience planted the seed for Weill Cornell and, coupled with the Medical Center's diverse patient population, is what drove her to come back for medical school.
"In order to treat any population as best as you can," she said, "you need to understand how they fit in the larger context of society. I don't think there's a better place to find that than in New York City."
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