article by Sarah Larimer via washingtonpost.com
Nick Wade was at track practice late one afternoon last week when he found out. The 18-year-old checked his phone and learned that he had made it into the Ivy League. “One by one,” he said. “I found out I had gotten into my schools.”
Wade is a quadruplet, though, with three brothers on his high school track team who had also applied to Ivy schools. So about that time on Thursday, they were learning their fates, too. There was Aaron, who was in the locker room when he logged on. And Nigel, who was stretching when his brothers told him to check. Zach was going to wait until practice was over, but his brothers weren’t having it.
“It would have taken like 20 more minutes,” said Zach, whose siblings checked for him. “But they couldn’t wait that long.”That is how the Wade quadruplets, of Liberty Township, Ohio, learned that all four had been accepted at Harvard and Yale universities — offers that added to a pretty impressive pile of potential college destinations.
“We’re still in shock, honestly,” Aaron said this week. “I don’t think it has sunk in yet.”“I just felt blessed at that moment,” Nigel said. “It was an unreal feeling, I guess.”“Honestly, to have one child from a family be accepted to a school like this is amazing,” Zach said. “But for all four to be accepted — I just don’t, I don’t know how it happened.”
Besides Harvard and Yale, the Wade brothers have loads of options for the next four years. Nick got into Duke, Georgetown and Stanford. Aaron is in at Stanford, too. Nigel made the cut with Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and Zach with Cornell. That list does not cover all the schools that offered them admission. But you get the idea.
These seniors at Lakota East High School are in high demand.“The outcome has shocked us,” Aaron said. “We didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to apply to all these schools and get into all of them.’ It wasn’t so much about the prestige or so much about the name as it was — it was important that we each find a school where we think that we’ll thrive and where we think that we’ll contribute.”
To read more, go to: Accepted, 8 times over: Ohio quadruplets earn spots at Yale, Harvard – The Washington Post
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The man came into the emergency room of St. Louis’ Barnes-Jewish Hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Having no insurance, he had avoided medical care as long as he could, but the pain had finally become too intense.
The gastroenterologist called in to consult that day was Darrell Gray, a young physician from Baltimore doing a fellowship at the hospital, which is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The patient, in his late 40s or early 50s, had blood in his stool and a mass in his stomach.
“It didn’t take much more diagnostic work to understand that, feeling the mass and seeing that his history of passing blood, this was likely a cancer,” Gray recalls. “Here’s a young guy who comes in with what was later found to be metastatic cancer. At that point I really couldn’t do much for him.”
That experience, and others like it, prompted Gray to continue his already extensive training, which included the fellowship, a residency at Duke, and medical school at Howard University. To top that off, he spent the last year at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Gray got a taste of public health work during his fellowship. While in St. Louis, he designed a bridge program to connect disadvantaged populations with the health care system. His target population was African-American men, who have a higher incidence of colorectal cancers than the general population, a reality that, in poorer neighborhoods, is compounded by other barriers to health care, such as a lack of insurance, a lack of knowledge about preventive measures, and chronic unemployment.
To reach these men, Gray contacted area churches, gave short educational presentations during the community announcement portion of Sunday services, and followed up with those who contacted him, connecting them with screening services and primary-care physicians. The experience was satisfying, but also made him realize how much he didn’t know.
“I realized from that program that there were some areas I needed strengthening in: health policy, public health, population health,” Gray said. “While I enjoy seeing a patient in the office, I want to be able to impact populations.”
Gray, who graduates this spring with a master’s in public health, said he has benefited greatly from his year at HSPH. In addition to his academic work, he shook hands with the prime minister of Namibia, met with the former health minister of Kenya, met senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, and met with Jonathan Woodson, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.
“I had high expectations coming in, but it has exceeded my expectations,” said Gray, who is at HSPH on a Mongan Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority Health Policy.