(Winter 2021) – “In my future career in medicine, I hope to teach and be an advocate for educational equality.”
Cecilia Zhou, SMART Class of 2015, just started her clinical rotations and is currently taking a deep dive into internal medicine. This SMART alumna is a second-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine pursuing a career in surgery.
Cecilia finds strength in overcoming the barriers she and her family faced along her journey to medical school. When she was six years old, Cecilia immigrated with her mom and remembers spending her birthday on the plane to San Francisco, where they lived with her grandparents. She admires her mother’s courage and sacrifice for leaving behind a life in China, where she once worked as an engineer.
Starting over in San Francisco, Cecilia’s mom took English and engineering courses at City College. Ultimately, due to her limited English-speaking skills, her mom was unable to find a job in the engineering field. To provide a stable income and to ensure a healthy environment for her daughter, Cecilia’s mom found work as a room attendant at a hotel.
The prominent values of hard work, determination, and perseverance instilled by her mom have stuck with Cecilia since she was young and have kept her on the path to medicine: beginning in the second grade, where she learned to read and write in English, to Katherine Delmar Burke School and San Francisco University High School, where she contended with the rigorous curriculum, and then later at Haverford College, where she received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in chemistry and a concentration in biochemistry.
Along her journey in medicine, Cecilia hopes to advance equity. In the summer of 2020, Cecilia and two of her peers created MedLegs, a podcast that fosters community and allyship for first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students in medicine.
Cecilia was ecstatic about a recent interview she did for her podcast with Dr. Damon Tweedy, the author of Black Man in a White Coat. “As a medical student, it’s a privilege to use my voice to promote access to students like me,” Cecilia shares.
Cecilia credits SMART as a pivotal program in her educational journey, where the support she received helped advance her dreams forward. She still remembers a SMART staff member’s encouragement when she dissected a frog during SMART’s programming years ago: “Your handiwork and skills are so good, you should become a surgeon!” Later this fall, Cecilia will start her clinical rotation in surgery.
