Minority Association for Pre-Medical Students

By: Aidan Sheedy

If you’re a pre-medical student at Quinnipiac University, chances are you’ll find many others just like you. But for people of color, navigating college without someone who looks like you can be challenging. That’s where MAPS comes in.

The Minority Association for Pre-Medical Students (MAPS) is a student organization that operates under a parent organization, the Student National Medical Association (SNMA). SNMA is a non-profit committed to supporting current and future underrepresented minority medical students and addressing underserved communities’ needs.

Ariba Chaudhry, a junior double-major in biology and behavioral neuroscience, currently serves as president of MAPS. She wants students to know that the mere existence of this organization can help students in numerous ways, and MAPS actually helped as a first-year herself.

As a Muslim, Chaudhry observed Ramadan last year. This holiday, according to NPR, is the most sacred time of the year for Islamic people and strictly encourages practicing Muslims to fast every day for the month from sunup to sundown. The fast also prohibits sex, alcohol and smoking.

During that time, Chaudhry struggled with keeping her academic and personal schedules separate. But, she said that with help from some MAPS executive board, she found solutions to a conflict most professors don’t think about.

“I remember in freshman year, I was having a tough time juggling that and handing in my lab reports on time,” Chaudhry said. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to do that on my own.”

Chaudhry’s club partner in crime, Krithi Goud, also felt unsupported when beginning her medical degree journey. But for her, it was not an adjustment exclusively.

“For me, my family grew up in a different country,” the junior behavioral neuroscience student said. “They came here and I was born here so we’re all kind of learning this together and it helps to have similar people, and similar backgrounds to get that information from.”

Goud said it was sometimes hard to keep your life flowing on the same page. But MAPS is here to help in the STEM and pre-medical fields.

“Being in science, you have to balance a lot of different things and it’s really important to take time for yourself,” Goud said. “In high school, I feel like you have all these guidance counselors … that can guide you along the way, but here, it’s hard to get meetings with certain advisors.”

MAPS also knows the university can’t do everything at once and run all programs perfectly, so the team said they act more like student ambassadors or guidance counselors because it is true that the school needs personnel to help out.

“Not one person knows everything,” Goud said. “So it’s nice to have the student perspective so we can also help one-on-one and give (a student) the real information they need.”