From the president
Oswaldo Romero Vasquez, a junior student at Pitzer College, is a passionate advocate for health and pedagogy. Driven by the vision of a medical system that creates space for a patient's individual experience of illness, he is committed to obtaining academic recognition while advocating for improvement of the biomedical and education systems. Through volunteering with organizations that support children's health and education, he has developed a passion to rebuild the policies that undermine the younger generation. He is set on an MD-MPH track to amplify his understanding of human health while being able to have an influence in the non-medical factors that impact the lives of a community.
Personal Statement
Being born in Venezuela and having moved here as a teenager, I have experienced many hardships. Amongst those, I experienced the deterioration of my family's health in face of survival. Because of that, I have witnessed the reality of a biomedical system that abandons the common person. It ignores a patient's personal experience while reducing their identity to pieces in a machine that is broken, only to provide a pharmacological 'quick-fix' or the "unavoidable" surgical intervention. Following my graduation from community college, I was on a personal endeavor of reshaping people's conceptions of health and medicine during my time as a physical trainer. Unfortunately, my efforts to make change felt futile. The member body and company's goal did not align with mine. The position fell short to the amount of impact I want to have on the public. In that moment, I had learned fitness is not a reflection of good health. Now I find myself at Pitzer, getting involved in classes and volunteer projects with the simple goal of 'making change happen'. Achieving academic excellence is my fight for freedom so I can support those who have been oppressed and continue to be.