Jamil Joyner

STUDENT

2022 MD Class President

Jamil Joyner is the newly elected Student Government Association president at Morehouse School of Medicine, but he is so much more than that. He is an Atlanta native and the youngest of three brothers. He is in the last year of an MD/MBA program on which Morehouse School of Medicine collaborates with Georgia Tech. He is a self-professed sports head, nature lover, and newly minted photographer, although his photographs do not seem those of an amateur at all. His eye is that good. He is also a second-generation Morehouse Man as his dad moved to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College in the 1980s.

Here’s a special story that brings a smile: Jamil’s dad, Dorian Joyner Sr., started a family while at Morehouse College and wound up not finishing. Years later, however, he went back to complete his degree, graduating from that revered institution with his son, Dorian Joyner Jr., in 2013, the year Jamil started.

Jamil describes himself as a big introvert who loves family, friends, and hard work, whether that hard work pertains to physical or more cerebral labor. “When I am not in my bubble,” he offers, “I am kind of relaxing, thinking, meditating, reflecting or in nature, I love to be around people, helping them or enriching them in a way that helps them along in their journey whether it has anything to do with me or not.”

In answering the question, why Morehouse School of Medicine, Jamil says that where you choose to be is not necessarily because of the external accolades, prestige factor or even the material as the material is the same regardless of the institution. The difference-maker, he states, is the people who inhabit a particular institution. How does that environment make you a better person, a better student, a better student-physician? “These places know us; they are us, and they know how to make the best of us,” he emphasizes.

That statement is particularly poignant as Jamil freely admits that he did not enjoy the academics of his first year, but attended class every single day regardless, because he knew as soon as he got to campus, he wouldn’t be able to walk five feet without coming into contact with

someone who made him smile, who uplifted him, which is how he got through those first two years. That he knew things would be exactly like that may speak to some kind of prescience, but it was merely that from the first time stepping foot on the grounds of Morehouse School of Medicine, it just felt like home, he said.

“What is going to make someone the best doctor is being the best you. The only place that can bring the best you out of you is being somewhere where you feel at home and Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine have always been home to me.”

In terms of reading, Jamil says he likes a lot of history, which speaks to his desire to know the history of… just about everything from basketball to early human history as the book he just finished was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Jamil says his agenda includes reorganizing and restructuring SGA from the bottom up, bringing in his newly-acquired business experience and acumen and his past experience with SGA at MSM. “MSM has expanded, really exploded, in the last 10 years in terms of increased student population. Thus, the scope of what SGA needs to cover now is different from when there were smaller class sizes. It is no one’s fault, of course, but we need to have the organizational capacity to do many of the things that SGA needs to do NOW. My goal for the 2022-2023 SGA is that the 20232024 SGA will be the best ever!”

“What is going to make someone the best doctor is being the best you.”

— Jamil Joyner

Claire Abel