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Vol. 2 No. 4

Alumni

Summer 2002

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Seize the Day Alum moves from immigrant worker to pharmacy school graduate to medical student by converting challenges to golden opportunities

For Ana Benitez-Graham, '98, the road from immigrant farm laborer to second year medical student has been filled with twists and turns, setbacks and challenges.

Born into poverty but rich in family, Ana came with her mother and younger siblings to the United States in 1984 to follow her father and older brother who arrived as migrant farm workers two years earlier. For several years, Ana worked alongside her parents in fields and orchards across the country before the family settled in Austin. Always an eager student, Ana learned English as she went along and attended school whenever possible.

She eventually earned her GED and began studies at Austin Community College before transferring to the UT College of Pharmacy. When she graduated in 1998, she became the first person in her immediate family as well as in her entire village of Mexico ever to receive a college education.

While working in a pharmacy to help support herself and her family, she spent volunteer hours helping non-English-speaking immigrants fill out papers and work their way through the employment, welfare, income tax, and citizenship processes to better their own lives.

Some of the twists and turns she has experienced led her to meet and marry Steve Graham and, with Steve, to welcome her first child. She became a naturalized American citizen.

After observing various insecticide-related skin maladies, Ana developed a keen interest in dermatological diseases while working as a migrant. She decided to go to medical school and intends to pursue a career in dermatology. Because the health of the migrant farm population is also a health policy issue, she plans to eventually add a degree in public policy and eventually pursue a career as a clinician and public health advocate.

In her second year at Duke Medical School, Ana has discovered that the road she has traveled from migrant worker to medical student has brought still new rewards.

She was recently notified that she is among the 30 recipients of the Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellows for 2002. Fellows receive annually a $20,000 maintenance stipend plus half-tuition for as many as two years of graduate study at any institution of higher learning in the United States.

"Ana truly exemplified the kind of creative, multi-talented, and extraordinarily accomplished New Americans that Paul and Daisy Soros want to honor and support through this program," said Warren Ilchman, director of the Fellowship Program.

In its fifth year of operation, the Soros Fellowships for New Americans has become one of the most highly recognized and sought-after awards for graduate study in the United States. More than 1,000 applicants who are naturalized citizens, resident aliens, or the children of naturalized citizens completed applications this year. The applicants represent 141 countries of national origin and came from 360 college and universities. The 30 selected fellows were drawn from 84 finalists who were interviewed in New York and Los Angeles.

The Fellowships were established in 1997 as a charitable trust of $50 million to assist new Americans in furthering their careers through graduate education. The donors, both new Americans themselves, created the trust to thank the United States for the life it has provided them and their children.