Kavita Mishra: Following her Family's Footsteps into Medicine
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Kavita Mishra
Kavita Mishra vividly remembers the Algerian motorcycle accident victim she met while volunteering at a hospital in Madrid.
"A large portion of his brain and skull was gone, but he could still speak four languages," Mishra, 23, recalls. The incident became a turning point in her life. A participant in a study-abroad program while attending Brown University, Mishra took the hospital stint as a way to assimilate faster. "I just thought it would be a great way to learn the language and the culture," she says. But when Mishra was intrigued by both the basic neurobiology and the medical science presented by the Algerian man's case, she decided to pursue her interest in medicine, surprising even herself. "I was always somewhat of a rebel," she says. "There are a lot of doctors in my family." In fact, medicine is a family business in the Mishra household. Mishra's parents moved to Riverside, CA, from India before her birth. Her father, Vinod, is a practicing physician in Riverside and an instructor at the UC Riverside-UCLA BS/MD program. Her mother, Rita, runs the business side of her father's medical practice. Instead of choosing a premedicine major in college, the self-proclaimed rebel majored in neuroscience with the idea of going on to graduate school or pursuing science journalism. It wasn't until after her experience in Madrid that Mishra embraced medicine as her career choice. That's because the encounters with the patients in the Madrid hospital piqued more than just her scientific curiosity. Mishra also became interested in the human side of providing health care. "We were just supposed to keep the spirits alive of the people who were there with no family," she recalls of the volunteer work. "I realized I liked working with people in that capacity."
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Third-year medical student Kavita Mishra explored Peru. (See larger) |