This is the fiftieth anniversary of the Travelers Summer Research Fellowship Program.
It is a tremendous milestone.
The mere fact that this program has influenced
and impacted the lives of so many of us,
many of us feel indebted to come back and to participate in the celebration.
I wouldn’t be the physician I am today
if it wasn’t for the summer research program here at Weill Cornell.
On the heels of the civil rights movement there was momentum for change.
Growing racial tensions reached a boiling point across America and academic institutions
were at the forefront.
Groups of marginalized students wanted more inclusion,
so they occupied administration buildings across the country
including Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University.
In 1969, the Travelers Program was started at Weill Cornell Medicine
as an effort to increase minority representation in medical schools
and the physician workforce.
We have students from all across the country, uh they’re college students who are interested
in medical school who are also not just interested
in becoming a physician
but also a researcher as well.
Diversity programs provide an avenue and a vehicle to introduce underrepresented minorities
to the field of medicine, provide them with mentorship and role models.
I think that was one of the biggest aspects of this program for me was meeting other physicians
who looked like me, who were from my community, who were doctors.
A key element of how the program has helped me in my own career is that built in the program
is this sense of excellence and doing your best and always trying to achieve to the highest
that you can to help others.
To this day that still is guiding me in my career.
Enrolling in the Travelers Program was a very important step in my personal life.
It was the first time I had been exposed to a formal um medical program.
The program further instilled in me uh the confidence
to pursue my career goals.
For me the Travelers Summer Research Fellowship Program was um absolutely life-altering not
just the friendships and the support systems that I um was able to form while I was here
but also being able to do research being able to be published, before I even got into medical
school was was tremendously helpful to me in in my career and in being able to get ahead.
It’s important to have programs like Travelers because not everybody starts from the same
place, and it helps ensure that they’re exposed and have equal opportunity.
The Travelers Research Program, it opens up your eyes to a lot of different things.
Diversity programs the ones where it helps you to feel yes I can do this, and to actually
see other people who have done it, which gives you the impetus to say yes I can do this and
then I’m also going to pull someone forward.
So I believe this program is important, and fifty years is a very poignant pause to take
and reflect.
Because in spite of fifty years of increasing access to medical education for underrepresented
minorities, we still have a shortage of physicians of color that is not reflective of the population
of this country.
If you look at diversity within healthcare right now you’ll see that it’s not where
it should be and uh I think we have a real great opportunity to change that and to move
that needle.
Diversity is excellence.
I am very very proud and pleased that Weill Cornell sees the importance of such a program.
You went in, you did it you succeeded and you pushed forward.
Congratulations to all of you.
Travelers has done a tremendous amount of work over the past fifty years.
But there is more work to do, there really is and what Travelers has done is really to
build a network of physicians who are colleagues who are friends, who are mentors for each
other so this program is definitely important and I would love to see it continue for the
next fifty years and beyond.
(cheering)