A Tale of Two GEMS Students
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n many ways, they are a study in contrasts: He’s tall, she’s tiny. He was born and raised in the District; she was born in the Philippines. Terrence Pleasant Jr.’s single parent is his mother; Maria Lourdes Tiglao’s, her father. He’s 24; she’s a dozen years older. Pleasant went straight through Maine’s Bowdoin College after high school before coming to Georgetown’s Experimental Medicine Studies—or GEMS—in July. Tiglao spent a couple of years in college, then finished her undergraduate degree in psychology while serving more than 11 years in the U.S. Air Force, a tour of duty that included more than three years oversees. While serving in the military, she worked on search and rescue medical teams as a cardiopulmonary critical care specialist.
Two Journeys, One Path Pleasant’s passion for medicine was sparked by the sudden death of his beloved great-grandmother, Mattie Fisher. “I was devastated,” Pleasant recalls, his face clouding. “Medicine, I had thought, was supposed to heal—not take—life. But medicine isn’t perfect.” Later, a job shadowing neurosurgeon Gary C. Dennis, M.D., at Howard University Hospital both restored Pleasant’s faith in the good of medicine and fueled his ambition to study neuroscience. For Tiglao, her desire to become a physician was spurred by her critical care team’s rescue of an 8-year-old boy severely injured by a land mine explosion in Afghanistan. Without the flight to a hospital, the boy would have died. “Our job [was] to take people and bring them to the next echelon of care. Most [were] on ventilators, they were on life support,” says Tiglao. “I saw how powerful medicine can be in bridging gaps and fostering communications.”
A Lifetime of Service For Tiglao, Pleasant and their 29 classmates, GEMS is an educational leg up, an edifying experience that levels the professional playing field and better equips them to thrive in medical school—at Georgetown or elsewhere. Most are already planning on a career that allows them to meaningfully reduce health disparities, taking Georgetown’s core value of service to others to the medically under-served in their home communities.
Terrence Pleasant Jr., left, and Maria Lourdes Tiglao believe GEMS has given them a leg up in their medical education.
That is precisely the sort of commitment the GEMS creators envisioned and long-time faculty members have worked for more than three decades to foster: helping financially, socially or culturally disadvantaged, scientifically talented college graduates to excel in medical school and, hopefully, return to serve as physicians in communities where access to high-quality care is not always readily available. “Regardless of what field of medicine I go into, my desire is to serve not just the under-served but to address and correct health disparities. But what I value and appreciate most is the intellectual prowess of my peers. The power of the peer and the commitment of the faculty is what really drives the program,” says Pleasant. ■
Tiglao adds, “I want to target those left in between: the homeless vets, the under-served vets.”
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