Students entering Harvard Medical School expect a rigorous learning experience. For upperclassmen working rotations in area hospitals, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken this rigor to a new level, and the experience has only emboldened their commitment to medicine.

Since he was in middle school, Jamaji Nwanaji-Enwerem, PhD ’18, MD ’21, has known he wanted to be a physician. The urge to couple that with research, however, was planted in the spring of his senior year in high school, the result of a call from a professor at Morehouse College.

Seven Harvard Medical School students have received 2021 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. They are among 30 graduate students to receive the merit-based award for immigrants and children of immigrants and were selected for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States.

In the fall of 1850, Harvard Medical School admitted its first three Black students, Daniel Laing, Isaac Snowden, and Martin Delaney. By the following spring, however, all three had been expelled. A group of white students protested the black students’ presence in the class, and Dean Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed the trio the following March.