Medscape September 13, 2024
Catherine Havemann, MD, is the first in her family to graduate from college. When she first arrived at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, she encountered an “unknown and shocking” spectrum of wealth and privilege.
Although one of her undergraduate advisors discouraged Havemann from entering medicine, two other advisors, themselves former first-generation (FG) college students, supported her ambition to become a physician.
Today, Havemann is a research fellow and junior faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her own student experiences at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, inspired her contributions to a study on FG medical students published in JAMA Network Open. “We realized that there was a paucity of research on this...