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Robyn Smith has been dancing
competitively her entire life, and now, at 26, she is applying
the discipline she learned in the dance studio to a life in
pediatric medicine. “There are things in dancing I’ve
had trouble with, like routines. You have to do them over and
over, and practice and practice until you get them right,” she
said in a recent interview. “The commitment to sustain
doing something until you get it right is what has helped me
in medicine.”
Smith, the only child of a retired auto worker
and a pharmaceutical company supervisor, graduated this spring
from Hershey Medical Center after receiving her undergraduate
degree in Microbiology from Eberly
College of Science in 2000.
But she wasn’t the
ordinary nose-to-the-grindstone student. In fact, her most
memorable event at University Park involved dance—an
event that included the bittersweet moment when she walked
out into Beaver Stadium as captain of the Penn
State Dance Team to perform in front of 95,000 spectators and a national
television audience. “It
felt overwhelming,” she admitted. “I’ve been
dancing all my life and have been performing in front of people,
but that day was different because it was the epitome of my
dance career. It gave me my high point in dancing, when I knew
I probably wouldn’t go on much farther once I began the
rigorous life of a medical student.”
Once at Hershey,
Smith, at first inundated with the amount of work, quickly
realized that, without dance, she had more free time than
she expected. She joined the Student National Medical Association,
a support network for minority medical students. Then she
mentored a young girl for almost three years through the Big
Brother Big Sister program in Harrisburg. She hoped it would
give her a meaningful relationship with a child, which she could
draw upon in her future as a pediatric doctor, but Smith thinks
the experience benefited both of them, especially when Smith
showed the seven-year-old the laboratories and classrooms
where the medical student spent her days.
“She was ecstatic.
She said, ‘I want to go to college,’ and
that touched me,” the young doctor said. “I
may be the only person who ever showed her a college. Now
maybe that’ll
stick with her forever.”
Smith also was elected to
the academic affairs committee, which involved her in
assisting the medical school with recruitment and retention of
minority students.
Then there was that moment when
she was on her pediatrics rotation, when she realized what it
would mean to heal children. She was assigned to a six-month-old
baby with a congenital heart disorder, who already had been through
two surgeries and was scheduled for a third. The baby’s
skin color was blue because her heart wasn’t pumping blood
properly. “I
was thinking, ‘Wow,
I want to be able to fix this,’” Smith said. “She
was so innocent. She was just laying there, helpless, and
depending on us to keep her alive. I remember thinking,
her whole future depends on God… and on us.”
Suzan
Erem
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