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🌟 Our third scholar of our Kenan Scholar series is Jason!🌟
Not too far from my apartment, when I was five, I had a neighbor named Sheila. She was the first person to introduce me to reading – we were very close. We did our laundry together in the laundromat every Sunday for about five years. And then all of a sudden, she stopped coming. And that's when I realized, as we found out, she had been evicted from her apartment and was living on a park bench about a few blocks away from where we lived. That was an eye opening experience that someone so close to you could suddenly face such hard challenges.
That really motivated me to continue understanding the root causes of the unhoused epidemic in New York City and the different ways that different organizations like Xavier Mission are working to solve this issue. By providing a welcoming environment at the soup kitchen, sort of giving them that shelter, that shelter that they don't have, and providing that hospitality to them for at least a couple hours every week, I get to really see their faces brighten up.
I want to be a physician and a big part of being a physician is also understanding the mental and physical needs of people, especially those in marginalized communities. I want to be a physician who works in community health and global health. There’s no better program than Kenan Scholars to introduce me firsthand to the issues that lie in community health starting with the unhoused population here in New York.
Jason Sethiadi, Hunter College '25
Interviewer: Avi Mikhaylov, Hunter College '24
Photographer: Jason Sethiadi, Hunter College '25
