“You don’t have to be an atom-splitting virtuoso to be a physician,” Dr. Ahkter proclaims. “The reality is, I myself was not a very good student in high school,” says the executive director for the Washington-based NMA, who is also a professor of Community Health at Howard University. “But when I went to college, with just a little bit of hard work and a little bit of luck, anyone can be a physician.
“[Here] at the NMA, one of the big things is to really be mentoring … go into the schools, talk to the young people and encourage them to take math and science, and encourage them [to] aim to become physicians so they will want to get their education and get into medical school.”
In addition to the NMA’s core philosophy, their main goal is to increase the number of African American physicians to a level in relative proximity to our overall U.S. population of 13 percent. Dr. Ahkter chides the exorbitant costs of medical school as a serious impediment to attracting more black medical students, saying the government should provide more monetary incentives. While the NMA believes mentoring is an invaluable asset that future students should use, scholarships, like the substantial sum that they gave to deserving students at the NMA’s 2007 Annual Convention and Scientific Assembly in Honolulu, will help. –terry shropshire
Learn more about the NMA by logging onto www.nmanet.org.
