Picture this: After countless years of schooling and training, you’re a doctor. Your white coat and stethoscope are a tribute to the tireless hours you dedicated to saving and enriching people’s lives. Your M.D. and “Doctor” title are tokens of the endless work you devoted to medicine. And best of all, you get to spend your days interacting with people of all shapes, sizes, and
conditions. All of them are there to see you and are there in hopes that your care and your empathy will be the reason their life is benefitted.
If you’re a premed or medical student, this is the dream. For some people, this is what they’ve been dreaming about since they were old enough to write their name; it’s what they consider their “life’s true calling”.
If you’re a doctor, this is the simplified (and glorified) version of your career. What’s not mentioned is the burnout rate. The sometimes very intolerant patients. All of the legal matters that accompany the job. The insurance. The fear. And the despair that comes with losing a patient.
Medical school is the hardest preprofessional program. If you take the mere schooling out of the picture, finding the courage to pursue the field is also extremely difficult when you’re at a disadvantage and have no role models to look up to when times become tough.
And that’s a large basis of why this website was created and probably why you are here today.
Hi. My name is Elise Fitzmaurice and I am a premed student at Michigan State University. I am a white female (she/her/hers) in hopes of becoming some form of surgeon. My favorite question to answer is “Why don’t you become a nurse instead?” But we’ll get to that question in a later blog post where I write about my favorite ways to answer that question.
Growing up, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by people involved in the medical community. Ranging from relatives to family members’ coworkers, I was so ingrained in medicine that it became what I lived and breathed—medicine is my passion, and if you’re here, I’m assuming it’s yours too.
But the more I thought about how lucky I was to be raised in such an inspiring community, the more I realized how underprivileged so many other hopeful-M.D. students were. For me, I was lucky to have a lot of role models and to have heard a lot of stories. I knew female surgeons. At any moment, I knew I could contact them and ask them how they persevered the constant push to be a nurse and the constant “How are you going to be a mom?” questions. Others, however, didn’t have these contacts. Which meant that they had to continually face the pushback, some in harsher forms, alone.
And that’s when I came up with the idea for this website.
My mission with The Underrepresented Physician is to share stories of residents and doctors who are underrepresented in their respective areas. Even if they haven’t experienced a lot of racial and gender discrimination, I hope to capture and write about their journey and ask about their recommendations to hopeful students or just simply people who want to listen.
The purpose of this website is meant to inspire and encourage. In no way am I trying to say that medicine is easy if you’re a white male—it’s not. Medicine is not easy for anybody. It’s a challenging field and can (and will) break every student or doctor down at one point or the next, whether that be from overwhelming stress or from failure. Rather, my goal is to capture how medicine
is particularly strenuous for those that are already at an initial disadvantage.
I hope you can find something on this website that inspires you throughout your day. I hope this website and these blog posts arrive when you need them, and that they encourage you to push forward on the medical path. Medicine should be a diverse field. And I hope that through time and through my posts, we can see that change.
See you next Sunday,
E.F.