Scholarship recipients Jayda Hinds (CAMED’27) and Isabel Joy (CAMED’28) meet their benefactor Dr. Elizabeth Brown during the event.

Scholarships

Annual Keefer Society Scholarship Dinner Celebrates Donors

Scholarship money is a financial lifeline.

Fourth-year medical student Latifa Pina was born on Fogo, an island in the Cape Verde island chain 400 miles west of Senegal, West Africa. With one-third of its 35,000 residents living in poverty, many leave Fogo to find work and a better life. Pina and her family left the island and moved to the U.S. when she was 13.

“I’ve been working since I was 16,” said Pina. “My mom works two jobs; my dad works two jobs.”

Pina is supported by multiple scholarships including the Simon A. Chernack Endowed Scholarship Fund. She was one of 116 students and donors attending the annual Chester S. Keefer, M.D. Society and Scholarship Dinner on September 17 at the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. The event honors Keefer, a former medical school dean (1955-1960) and was established to recognize donors whose lifetime contributions have reached $100,000 or more. The medical school’s scholarship endowment has grown from $15 million 27 years ago to more than $184 million today.

Hee-Young Park, PhD, dean, ad interim, told the audience that scholarships now cover up to $55,000 of the $74,000 annual tuition, with the goal of eventually covering the entire amount. Living expenses, fees and other costs push the estimated total annual cost of attendance to between $103,000 and $118,000.

“There’s no way I would be here if it wasn’t for scholarships,” said Pina. “I knew going into medicine that my parents would not be able to help me. They are just trying to survive, so to get that scholarship and to be at Boston University, close to my family, I knew this was the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Third-year medical student Isabelle Joy also realized early on that she alone would be bearing the financial burden of a medical education.

“Let me be clear; I would not be able to attend medical school without your generosity,” said Joy, who was one of two student speakers to address the guests at the Keefer scholarship dinner. Joy discovered her love and aptitude for research while in medical school. In her case, scholarship money helped her to put in the lab time needed to do that work.

“Because of you, we can focus on our studies and we can eat dinner, and we can show up for our families and fill our gas tanks,” Joy said. “We feel your support every day, and we are really grateful.”

Edward Kochis worked for seven years before entering medical school. At 32 and a third-year medical student, he is one of the older members of his class. His wife is also in medical school at BU. They will graduate together next year and Kochis recently looked at their combined loans, an experience he called “humbling.” With a baby on the way, he appreciated the financial help he received from the Drs. Karen and Elliott Antman Medical Student Scholarship Fund.

“My parents, my family, my wife can support me emotionally, but now, through this scholarship I have the material support that gives me peace of mind,” said Kochis, the evening’s second student speaker. “It shows that the community believes in me, even though it took me a while to get here.”

Retired urologist Joseph McEvoy, MD ’73, credited his wife Shirley with the idea of creating an endowed scholarship. The couple flew from their home in Seattle to be inducted into the Keefer Society. Shirley McEvoy recalled that when she was a student, the college she was attending raised the tuition without increasing her financial aid. She returned home to the University of Washington where in-state tuition was much cheaper.

“It was a big deal. If they had increased my scholarship I probably would have stayed,” said McEvoy.

Andrew Pendergrass has been a beneficiary of the Wexler Scholarship Fund for all his four years in medical school. He is currently submitting his applications for a residency in emergency medicine.

“If I didn’t have the scholarship, I’d be taking out larger loans and cutting back on living expenses,” said Pendergrass. The financial worries, he said, are compounded during residency when school loan payments begin during a period with relatively low pay and long work hours. Also, new federal rules on student loans make it more difficult to obtain and repay them, he said.

“The scholarship definitely gives you more stability,” he said.

Andrew Wexler, MD’80, MA, a retired craniofacial plastic surgeon and clinical professor at the University of Southern California, has continued to contribute to the scholarship fund started by his father, grandfather and uncle in 1977. The fund stipulates that recipients major in the humanities as an undergraduate.

“I felt it was very important that people going into medicine should know literature, that they needed to know the more human aspects of a liberal arts education,” said Wexler, who was attending the Keefer Society scholarship dinner for the first time.

“The opportunity to meet with students who have benefitted from my family scholarship is wonderful,” he said. “I enjoy the excitement they have for what they are doing, just as I had when I was a student. That gives me great joy.”