At 13, Erik Cabral was a knife-toting gang tough in San Jose, cruising for turf skirmishes and watching his compatriots get shot and killed. Today, the violence of the streets is behind him. Cabral, ’00, is a 26-year-old student at Stanford Medical School. What spelled the difference between a life of poverty, struggle and prison—or worse—and the bright future that now awaits him? Angels, perhaps; self-determination, for sure; and an innovative program called the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program (SMYSP), most definitely.
Since 1987, SMYSP has helped hundreds of disadvantaged students find a better way. Every summer the program selects 24 participants from low-income backgrounds in Northern and Central California to spend five weeks at Stanford learning about health care and medicine. They take classes in basic sciences and public health and gain hands-on experience dissecting cadavers, observing surgery, serving as bilingual translators in the emergency room, working as nurses’ aides and conducting health care policy research. Their weekly routine includes working two days in Veterans Affairs or Stanford hospitals and four to eight hours in anatomy and pathology labs taught by medical students.
They also spend several days a week learning career strategies that may be foreign to them but routine for most middle- and upper-income teens—how to fill out college applications and write essays, secure financial aid, negotiate interviews, draft resumes and improve SAT scores.
By all indications, SMYSP is meeting its objective: to make the health professions more attuned to underserved communities by developing a cadre of professionals from these communities; and to encourage graduates to give back through public service. To date, 95 percent of the program’s 357 graduates have been admitted to colleges and universities, many of them top-tier schools, where 70 percent of them major in the biological and physical sciences. Of those who finish college, 10 percent go on to medical school, 30 percent to other graduate programs and 20 percent to other health-related jobs. Many graduates have become mentors in their own right, some with SMYSP.
Daniel Sanchez, for example, attended the program in 1995, then graduated from Yale. Now a second-year Stanford medical student, he taught anatomy at SMYSP last summer. Cabral returned as a physiology instructor and hopes to get a similar program started at UC-San Diego. Filamer Kabigting, ’03, a 1997 participant, co-directed the 2002 session.
The program started as the brainchild of two Stanford premed students who shared a conviction that teenagers from even the worst hard-luck situations can excel, given encouragement and effective role models. Michael McCullough, ’88, and Marc Lawrence, ’87, enlisted research scientist Marilyn Winkleby, now an associate professor of medicine and director of the Program to Advance Diversity in Medicine. As founder/adviser of the project, she scratched together some grant funding.
“We first reached out to students from East Palo Alto,” Winkleby says. “Eventually, we met seven teenagers who were interested, and every morning Michael and Marc [went] to pick them up and bring them to Stanford.”
The following summer, the program became residential to give participants a better feel for college life. The three organizers recruited volunteers from the Stanford medical community and lined up Stanford undergraduates, many from minority groups, to serve as teachers, guides and mentors to the teenagers. Spreading the word among high school principals, guidance counselors and science teachers resulted in more than 250 applicants, and interest continues at that level.
Jenny Patten came to the program two summers ago from a turbulent East Oakland neighborhood. She’d worked hard to get into SMYSP, but when she arrived on campus, the stark reality of spending five weeks away from home with strangers hit her. She was half Apache, hardly knew her birth father and had lost two grandparents to alcoholism. Her mother struggled to provide for the family by cleaning houses. “I thought, these people are never going to understand who I am,” she recalls.
Patten’s fears subsided when she realized her classmates had experienced family tragedy and sickness, war in their homelands and gangs on their home turf, abuse and neglect, the stigma of poverty and even hunger. Ten counselors and a host of professional staff gave the students constant support.
Working in the anatomy lab proved particularly intriguing to Patten. “It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body and I was scared,” she says. But before long she was prying open rib cages and peering at organs like a pro. She donned scrubs and observed surgeries for ovarian cancer and a hip replacement. “The doctors were incredibly nice, explaining everything to us as they went along,” she says. Eventually, she became an assistant to anesthesia technicians, preparing doctors’ trays and helping with cleanup.
“Amazing” is the word Dr. Salah Ahmed uses to describe the SMYSP students he oversees as morgue supervisor at the va hospital. “With many of them, I wonder how they have managed to survive. But when they come here, it’s as if they have forgotten all the hardships, and for those five weeks they are really focused on everything here.”
Patten says the summer tutoring paved her way to college. “My SAT scores jumped 300 points, to about 1300,” she says. “My family would never have been able to afford the prep classes.” Accepted at a handful of top universities, Patten chose Stanford, where she has just finished her first year. SMYSP counselors steered her to a dream scholarship that will fully subsidize her undergraduate and graduate studies; she plans to pursue a career in health policy.
Judith Ned, who joined SMYSP as executive director in 2001, emphasizes that the program encourages students to bring their knowledge back to their communities, right after the summer session and throughout their careers. For example, research projects engage them in identifying risk factors for obesity, HIV/AIDS and cardiovascular disease in low-income neighborhoods. “We want students to think about what’s working in their communities, what isn’t working, and how they can become advocates for positive change,” she says.
Jesus Rodriguez, ’94, got the message. A 1989 participant in SMYSP, he’s now a family physician at a Fresno, Calif., clinic. “The population I serve is ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged and most are medically indigent. I feel I have returned to my community and am trying to make a difference every day that I see patients.” Rodriguez says he’d like to start an individual mentoring program right in his office.
Beyond staying connected with SMYSP, Cabral became a health advocate in his old San Jose barrio. He has worked on border health issues as a congressional intern for the Hispanic Caucus Institute and volunteered in a Mexican hospital.
Winkleby sustains the program on a shoestring budget of little more than $200,000 a year, most of which she cobbles together through grants and individual donors. As part of her efforts to secure an endowment, she has published a book about the program that profiles 16 of its graduates (see sidebar). She and Ned plan to expand the project to include year-round school-based activities.
For now, what holds SMYSP together is mainly the love that Winkleby, Ned and scores of volunteers pour into it. Their biggest reward is seeing the program’s graduates poised to enrich the well-being of thousands of people. As Cabral, who plans to conduct medical research in directions that benefit the underserved, remarks, “Without SMYSP, I don’t know if I would have gotten where I am today. It’s like, what if a guitarist never saw a guitar?”
Marguerite Rigoglioso,is a freelance writer in Larkspur, Calif.
