Special to the Record
Sophia Vasquez, a 10th-grade student at Chelsea High School, was recently selected to be part of the Katharine Stansmore MD Mentorship Program, a new opportunity through MGH that will connect Sophia with a one-on-one mentor who will provide her guidance and support for college and beyond. Vasquez, center, with MGH staff members.
With her selection into a competitive mentorship program with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Chelsea High School student Sophia Vasquez is one step closer to a dream career in medicine.
The CHS scholar and 10th grade student, who has been in the MGH Youth Scholars program since her freshman year, was recently selected into the Katharine Stansmore MD Mentorship Program. This brand-new program, established by the MassGeneral Brigham Women’s Heart Health Program, will provide Sophia with personalized guidance and support with an MGH mentor catered to Sophia’s passions and goals. She will also receive college application assistance, a strong reference letter and a scholarship to aid with initial college costs.
Sophia’s experience with MGH has exposed her to a wide-range of components of the medical field. She has shadowed staff members who regulate emergency rooms, met with specialists in various fields such as cardiology where she learned about different parts of the heart from a cardiovascular surgeon and even dissected pig hearts. The hands-on experience and experiential learning has helped her start to think about potential career paths and identify specific interests that she has in mind.
“I just know that I wanted to do something hospital related. I knew I wanted to do a lot of schooling and whatnot. Going into the program, we go to so many different places and do so many different things that it definitely helps you narrow it down,” Sophia said. “Now I definitely have more of an idea of what I want to do … I just know it has to be in a hospital. I would like to work with maybe patients, but when they’re under anesthesia.”
Sophia will meet monthly with her MGH mentor, and has already had one meeting where they established expectations for the program. She learned about how they can assist her with her future college applications and the additional resources she will be able to access. With the Youth Scholars program, she has already benefited from meeting current college students who have shared how the applications process is and stories of college acceptance to universities like Harvard.
A lifelong student at Chelsea Public Schools, Sophia credits her time in middle school at the Wright Science & Technology Academy (WSTA) as influential in her career aspirations. She participated in the “IDEAS in Medicine” after school program at WSTA, which is a STEM-focused program available to students that incorporates resources and experiences with a partnership with Tufts University. She remembered having fun speaking with people from Tufts and enjoyed being a teacher’s assistant, “TA”, as an eighth grade student, mentoring the younger students in the IDEAS program.
Her teacher at the Wright and advisor for the IDEAS program, John Ruggiero, added, “Sophia came in as a 7th grader and you could tell that she was bright…and so, so curious about the biological world around her. I did my best to foster that curiosity —sometimes in unorthodox ways. I’d say ‘Sophia, it took scientists 350 years to solve this problem , you’ve got 45 minutes’ and when she’d attack and conquer it, well, we knew we had someone that was generationally special. However, Sophia was incredibly shy, so I pushed her leadership expectations exponentially and she quickly thrived in that role as well. Questions over email from her quickly became questions in class and evolved into full-out tangents. Taking on all of these challenges could not have been easy, but she made it look that way.”
Sophia is able to balance the time she spends in the MGH program, which has weekly responsibilities, but doesn’t have any out-of-school work (she described it as a “fun extracurricular”) with her schoolwork at CHS. She credits her teachers at CHS for being flexible with students regarding coursework. She has a busy schedule that also includes participation in
CHS’ Debate Club as well as weekly volunteering at a Chinese school in Chinatown, volunteer hours that she aspires to use towards acceptance into the National Honor Society.