BU effort offers a summer of science Program mentors minority students

For $9.50 an hour, Christina Richardson nursed ailing patients — and her own bruised dreams — during the past three summers at a Louisiana nursing home.

Growing up in a community that set low expectations for her future, Richardson, a 21-year-old rising senior at Xavier University in New Orleans, says she had to protect her ambition of “being a real doctor, saving people on the brink of death,’’ not unlike the trauma physicians she watched on “ER.’’

“People just didn’t believe me — ‘You’re going to try and be a doctor?’ ’’ Richardson says, remembering the sting of the skepticism from her nursing home patients.

This summer, Richardson is working alongside PhD students who, instead of questioning her ambitions, push her beyond her comfort zone. She is conducting lab research for the first time at Boston University’s School of Medicine, which launched a program in partnership with Xavier, a historically black private college, that aims to immerse minority students in a summer of science.

Read the rest of the Boston Globe story here

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