Ten first-year students from the Geisel School of Medicine and two first-year students from the College were selected as fellows for 2015-2016 New Hampshire-Vermont Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. The 12 fellows will each receive a $2,000 stipend for 200 service hours over the course of year. In addition, they have on-site faculty mentorship, along with other forms of support including orientation, retreats and meetings.
College faculty, Geisel administrators and previous fellows selected the five teams from Geisel and one team of undergraduate engineering students, Fellowship program director Nancy Gabriel said.
“We tried to find a range of projects, working with different populations in different parts of the community, and I think we did that,” she said.
Marvah Hill Pierre-Louis, one of the 12 fellows, said that upon reading about Albert Schweitzer, a renowned physician for whom the fellowship is named, she was inspired by his values and wanted to continue his spirit by participating in the program.
John Mascari, Pierre-Louis’ teammate, said the program will be a rare learning opportunity that will help him throughout his medical career.
Mascari and Pierre-Louis will be working with the Vermont Department of Health to help the Good Neighbor Health Clinic implement protocols in the effort to eliminate subjectivity in doctors’ observation of patients.
Nayrana Carneiro and Alexander Soto-Edwards will launch a project that offers free medical consulting and service to the residents at the Haven and other members of the Upper Valley. Carneiro said that the goal of their project is to reduce the number of emergency room visits by creating a more informed community. She applied to the program because she wanted to make this project sustainable.
Soto-Edwards said that becoming a fellow has been an inspirational experience, particularly seeing how all of the different projects will give back to the community and how each of the fellows, as individuals, can make a difference.
Ahra Cho and Claire Hogue, another team of fellows, said that they both participated in Teach For America prior to coming to Geisel and conceived this project in an attempt to incorporate their background in education with their medical studies. Under the project, Cho and Hogue will develop curricula for local middle school students to inform them on issues such as mental and physical health and drug and substance use.
Hogue said that interaction with other fellows helped them to further develop their ideas.
Cho said that she became interested in the program because she thought it would be helpful for middle school students to have mentors in medical field.
“Not only is it a tremendous honor, I think that it’s a great opportunity for our program to grow,” she said. “In terms of the added financial support they give us, publicity they help us with and resources and mentors they connect us to are really invaluable.”
Brendin Beaulieu-Jones and Ana Rodriguez-Villa are working on a project to create a supportive network and curriculum for LGBTQ youth in the Upper Valley area. They want to enrich their curriculum with what they have learned at Geisel and expand beyond just LGBTQ individuals to become create a more inclusive support system.
Beaulieu-Jones said that the various Schweitzer fellow projects open more options for undergraduate students to get involved and contribute to the community.
Continuing a project initiated by former Schweitzer fellow Rachel Glikin ’17, Juergen Buchsteiner ’18 and Madeleine Yi ’18 will teach science and technology to elementary school students through playing with Legos. At the end of the year they will host an exposition, where the elementary school students will display their Lego works and posters.
Buchsteiner said that the team seeks to expand the project by working with more elementary schools and potentially involving students from Hanover High School as volunteers.
Fellows from the University of Vermont, University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth comprise the New Hampshire-Vermont chapter of Schweitzer Fellowship, with about six or seven coming from Dartmouth per year.
Ashley Hamel and Sumitha Raman, who could not be reached by press time, will provide sexual education to 15 female students from Stevens High School with the goal of giving them confidence and creating comfortable spaces to talk about their experiences.
