I was lucky enough to have a childhood in which people who looked like me were doctors, scientists, teachers, or anything else they wanted to be. I grew up watching people in my community go into various professions. This normalized Black excellence, achievement, and choice for me. When I moved to the United States at the age of 8, I suddenly became racially minoritized, and finding people who looked like me in medicine became nearly impossible. I did not come across a Black physician until almost a decade later when I started college. Fortunately, my formative years and the support I had from my family allowed me to continue to dream that I could one day become a physician.
As I reflect back on my journey so far, I realize that lack of diversity, especially in academic medicine, remains a problem. The importance of workforce diversity has been increasingly recognized in academic medicine, but this has not translated in increased number of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) physicians. For example, hematology/oncology fellowship has consistently ranked last of all internal medicine subspecialties in racial/ethnic diversityHistorically excluded fellows in hem/onc, such as African American, Hispanic/Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Natives, make up only
