Dr. Patrice Harris is totally giving us #BlackExcellence goals right now.
This ambitious doctor who hails from Bluefield, West Virginia in the United States of America, will serve as the Association’s 174th president, Charleston Gazette-Mail reports.
The West Virginia University (WVU) graduate, who begins her tenure as president June 2019, knew she wanted to be a doctor, but wasn’t sure how to achieve it since no one else in her family had gone to medical school.
“No one in my family had gone to medical school, and I had no family friends that did… it is not an easy thing to do if you don’t know or don’t have guidance about what to major in.”
Harris had studied psychiatry in Atlanta, Georgia and reveales that she she initially planned to specialise in a different field of medicine when she found that she had an unusual love for how the brain worked.
“The brain was just fascinating to me, and when I went to my third-year psychiatry clerkship I felt at home, and I then decided that I could merge my love for working with children and adolescents with psychiatry.”
“I recall early on I had been advised to perhaps go into nursing and not medicine. Nursing is a very noble career and noble profession, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. It could have been related to the fact that I was a woman, the fact that I was a person of color…I don’t know.”
Despite the challenges she has faced along the way, she says her family always supported her.
“I always knew from my family and my parents that I could be whatever I wanted to be.”
Rise, Black Girl, Rise!
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