As a Black woman, I was told not to pursue a career in medicine. The path must be easier for others.

Fortunately, my mother and grandmother taught me to respond to naysayers by working twice as hard, being twice as good and accepting half the recognition. I did this throughout high school, when my college aspirations were continually challenged, even though I graduated at 16; throughout college at a historically Black university, when the pre-med advisers — all White — discouraged me from applying to medical school; when I had to fight my way off the medical school waitlist despite my sterling application; and throughout medical school and residency, when too few colleagues and mentors looked like me and my outsider status was cemented. When, in my first semester of medical school, my biochemistry professor told me that I wouldn’t survive because I’d attended an HBCU and therefore received a subpar education, I felt doomed before I’d even begun.