On Friday morning, March 21, 148 students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA excitedly gathered to learn their fate for the next three to seven years.
Match Day is an annual celebration, when medical students find out where they will be working for residency, the next step on the path to becoming doctors. Some stay local, while others move to far-reaching parts of the country.
Among the DGSOM students, 30% are pursuing primary care specialties, led by Internal Medicine and then Psychiatry. Around 63% of students will stay in California – with 25% continuing at UCLA Health for their training.
Following are two students who are committed to social justice:
PRIME-LA
The following student is part of PRIME-LA, a program dedicated to serving under-resourced communities by training underrepresented medical students who are passionate about addressing health disparities.
A first-generation Latin student eager to lead
As a daughter of an immigrant mother from Mexico and a father from Puerto Rico, Samantha Garcia was shaped by her family’s experiences. She is also the first in her family to graduate from college, navigating higher education without the guidance of her parents or three older siblings. While her family faced challenges, including the incarceration of one of her brothers, her mother’s involvement in support groups introduced her to the power of advocacy and community.
Seeing firsthand how systemic injustices affected her brother, Garcia was drawn to a career committed to social justice and advocacy for marginalized communities — ultimately choosing to do so through the lens of health care, as a physician.
Prior to medical school, Garcia worked at a community health clinic, where she provided nutrition education to Latinx families. Garcia continued to focus on under-resourced communities in medical school and helped develop a virtual prenatal education program for low-income, under-insured patients.
Part of Garcia’s inspiration to choose OB-GYN was her mother’s battle with ovarian cancer. Helping her mother through her cancer journey inspired her to care for patients going through similar women’s health challenges.
Garcia is also pursuing an MBA, preparing herself with leadership and management skills to improve the quality and accessibility of women’s health care services for vulnerable communities.
“My identity as a first-generation college graduate, my mom's story, and my health education work with the Latinx community are deeply interconnected and what really matters to me,” Garcia said.
Global Health Program
The following student is part of the Global Health Program, which gives medical students the opportunity to work on a health project abroad and advance health equity.
A medical student who has worked across the globe
Growing up in the Bay Area and taking annual trips to India to visit family, Shivani Dayal saw the sharp contrast in education, infrastructure, pollution and access to medical care between the two areas. Seeing the inequities put Dayal on a path to work at the intersection of medicine, public health and policy.
After college, Dayal received a master’s degree in public health, where she worked for the Ministry of Health in the Maldives with the goal of improving health systems on a government level, and then worked for the Centers for Diseases Center and Prevention Foundation during the COVID-19 pandemic. During medical school, Dayal helped to establish a monitoring and evaluation system for a primary care pilot program with the Ministry of Health in Armenia.
As Dayal is looking forward to residency, she aims to balance her interest in critical care medicine, spending time abroad supporting longitudinal global partnerships, and researching health systems domestically.
“I want to further understand the cultural, political, and historical differences that impact health systems and, whether local or abroad, work to provide equitable health care delivery to all patient populations,” Dayal said.
