A Beacon of Hope

According to BBC news reports, Yuliana Dominguez Paez, a 24-year-old student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, New York, was going to miss the mysterious assembly that her faculty had scheduled on Monday morning, February 29.

Stuck in New York City’s interminable traffic, she asked a friend to FaceTime her with any news.

From the other end of the line, “all I heard was screams,” she said. “And, ‘free tuition.'”

Back on campus, Dr Ruth Gottesman had just changed the lives of Ms Dominguez Paez and her peers.

The college’s 93-year old former professor, philanthropist, and widow of a major Wall Street financier announced to a packed auditorium that she was donating one billion dollars, with the intention of eliminating tuition fees for those studying medicine at the school.

The students screamed. They cheered. They called their mothers. In the back of an Uber, Ms Paez cried. “When I got back to campus… I just hugged all my friends, because this is life-changing for all of us.”

As the United States grapples with a student debt crisis, Albert Einstein College of Medicine has suddenly charted a different course.

This account of the reactions to Dr. Gottesman’s exceedingly and transformative generous gift is a follow-up from last week’s blog, “It is Healing Work”.

We simply want to share the reactions of those who benefit from such incredible support from caring, open-hearted support from people of immense good-will. 

Someone To Tell It To benefits from people such as these, too. Throughout our existence, generous donors who believe in our mission and work – and who see and feel its power to make life better – have given, often sacrificially, to help others to benefit from our listening, training, and educational work. They have helped to make significant differences in the lives of those whom we have served. 

As we write this, we continue to remind everyone that a long-time significant donor organization has recently gifted Someone To Tell It To with $11,000 dollars and asked us to challenge other donors to give what they can to match this gift, therefore doubling its impact and significance. 

We cannot thank this donor enough for their consistent support and affirmation of our work and the change they are helping us to make because of it. 

So, we hope that you will also join them in making a larger difference in the lives of those who are feeling lonely, grief-stricken, broken-hearted, uncertain, and overwhelmed. You can go here to make that difference so that this world can feel listening’s life-changing and life-affirming power in their lives.

We thank you for supporting this effort and for saying to the world that there is hope for better ways and better days for us all. 

Just see how a well-placed gift can inspire and motivate and enable our lives to be transformed, according to BBC reporting. You can help to make it happen, too:

“It felt like an answered prayer,” said Sam Woo, a first-year medical student from the Midwest who wants to focus on addiction medicine and providing healthcare to low-income patients.

“Something that I think about a lot when choosing my career path is money, because it’s really important for me. I come from a low-income background and street outreach is not the most lucrative field,” Mr Woo, 23, said. “But now I don’t have to worry about, ‘Okay, I should choose a specialty that pays more, so I can support people back home and so I can support myself.’ I can actually do things I’m really passionate about.”

Dr Peter Campbell, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the college, said eliminating the financial burden meant his students were able to choose their paths in medicine without worrying about what it might pay.

He described that Monday as “unquestionably the happiest day” he had experienced in 20 years of teaching, including three at Einstein.

“We saw all our students coming in, they were absolutely electric,” he said. “I’ve never seen 20-something year-olds collectively that happy in my life. There was just so much pure happiness.”

The students will still have to pay for costs like housing, food, test preparation, and registering for exams – costs that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. But there is no question that the new policy could prove to be transformative for the approximately 1,000 current students.

Trevor Barker, a 25-year-old from California, said his classmates were talking about getting married or having children sooner than they had previously thought, thanks to their freedom from loans.

“I feel like what I’m most excited to see is seeing an increase in applications that reflect the population in the Bronx,” said Ms Dominguez Paez. “Because now they know that they have the opportunity to afford going to medical school.”

He said: “This is an opportunity for reinventing the wheel and rethinking what admissions looks like, how we assess who gets to become a doctor.”

Jade Andrade, 30, who aspires to work in pediatric medicine, was thrilled for herself and her classmates.

“But I think the most exciting thing is really the impact this will have on future generations of students,” she said. “The larger picture is, this is really a beacon of hope.”Won’t you be a beacon of hope, too, by supporting Someone To Tell It To’s matching gift initiative so that we can share more incredible stories of those you are supporting through our mission to help the world to listen?

Photo by Zachary Nelson on Unsplash