Tracy Yang AB ’11 selected UGA because it provided space to find her ideal career path.
“I wanted somewhere with strong academics, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted my career to look like,” says Yang, a Macon native and now a pediatric hospital medicine fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital.
And after being selected for the Foundation Fellowship, it was an easy decision. Yang wanted to shape her academic life around opportunities for exploration. As a Fellow, she studied abroad and received strong mentorship. And as graduation approached, she looked for her next step.
So she applied to medical school and for the Rhodes, hopeful that the best path forward would present itself.
“I think I knew that the typical route to medical school was not necessarily right for me,” she says. “I wanted to be able to think and explore fields related to medicine but not directly applicable to the typical coursework required for medical school.”
The best path went through Oxford and led to a degree in medical anthropology. This course of study related to Yang’s undergraduate anthropology degree, but it also provided a new layer to Yang’s approach to medicine and patient care.
“It has helped me take a step back from some of the assumptions we make in our medical and health care systems,” she says.
It also extends to considering the whole context of patient lives, something Yang hopes to improve through research. Her current project will translate and culturally adapt a scale to measure experiences of discrimination from families of different cultures.
It’s a rewarding project, she says, and a lot of it springs from the foundation laid at UGA.
“When I came to UGA, I had no experience of research. I’d never traveled internationally. I barely knew what anthropology was,” she says. “I didn’t think I wanted to be a doctor. And within four years I had explored so many different countries, so many different fields, and had wonderful mentors. Those years were incredibly pivotal for me.”