HMS/HSDM Class Day: Keynote Takes New Look at Basics of Being a Doctor HSPH Class Day: Ho urges HSPH Grads to Boost Public Knowledge, Spark Scientific Wonder DMS Symposium: The Immune System Casts a Widening Net At the Millennium: Three Deans Call for Collaboration to Spur Discovery, Gain Better Health Faculty Symposium: Talks Demonstrate Community of Research and Education Class Day 2000: Student Speakers Stress Diversity, Patient Care HMS Alumni: Alums Bring 25-Year Perspective to Experience of Women, Minorities at HMS Class Symposium: Grads of '75 Mix Medicine and Public Health Birth of Glial Cells Revealed Job Stress: An Occupational Hazard for Women Message from the Heart Affects Outside Vessel Growth Koski to Head Human Research Office in Washington Rudenstine to Step Down, Presidential Search Committee Being Formed HSPH to Hold International Symposium on Aging and Health Honors and Advances News Briefs Cultures Cross over Circumcising Girl Front Page

HMS ALUMNI Alums Bring 25-Year Perspective to Experience of Women, Minorities at HMS "This career did not come easy," said Laura Tosi, HMS '75, chair of the Department of Orthopedics at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., in a panel discussion during the Class Symposium on June 8. "I think that it has been very different for me than the guys," Tosi told her classmates. HMS alumna Judith Huff served as moderator for the panel, "Great Expectations: The Experiences of Women and Minority Members of the Class of '75," held in the MEC amphitheater. Huff reported that in an informal mail survey she conducted on her classmates, three of the 28 participants felt that knowing what they know now, they would not have chosen medicine as a career. "All three of these respondents were women and all three had children," Huff said. Similarly, seven respondents felt that the reality of medicine fell short of their expectations; each of these respondents also was a woman. "They were asked to do the impossible," concluded Huff. That the HMS experience 25 years ago was different for men and women is clear. Composing less than 21 percent of the class of 163 students, women were truly a minority. Told by boyfriends that they "must be gay" and villainized by the community for "taking a man's spot" in the class, thereby "forcing him to go to Vietnam," women who wanted to be doctors in the early 70s faced unique obstacles. When "girlie slides" were mixed with microbiology images during lecture, at least one alumna recalled "storming out of the lecture hall." But who is a minority anyway? Panelist José Regau-Perez, chief of the Epidemiology Section at the Dengue Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Puerto Rico, reminded his classmates that "at some time in our life, we are each a minority. Everyone is unique." Audience members added that students who were gay or poor also faced discrimination during medical school. Women still may face unique experiences at HMS, but they no longer hold minority status. In the graduation ceremony held concurrently on the Quad, more than 52 percent of the HMS Class of 2000 were women. —Catherine Chu