For $9.50 an hour, Christina Richardson nursed ailing patients \u2014 and her own bruised dreams \u2014 during the past three summers at a Louisiana nursing home.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbeing a real doctor, saving people on the brink of death,\u2019\u2019 not unlike the trauma physicians she watched on \u201cER.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople just didn\u2019t believe me \u2014 \u2018You\u2019re going to try and be a doctor?\u2019 \u2019\u2019 Richardson says, remembering the sting of the skepticism from her nursing home patients.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n