Scholarships are Shaping Tomorrow’s Top Docs

This month, Richmond Magazine named the Top Docs in the region and more than 200 were from VCU Health. The MCV Foundation is proud to support the important education of our health care professionals, including some of our future top docs. Here are just a few of their stories.

Charles Payne

Working on an ambulance offered Charles Payne, an invaluable education in humanity. 

A Richmond, Virginia, EMT for more than a decade, Payne recalls that running calls all over the city was both gratifying and grounding. He enjoyed the fast pace of emergency care and that no two days or nights were ever the same. He loved the immediacy of helping people without regard to their status and he learned how to relate to them and make them feel better — lessons that had nothing to do with administering medicine.  

Payne moved from the ambulance to the emergency room five years ago when he became a certified paramedic and started working in the emergency department at VCU Medical Center. Now he’s embarked on the next chapter of his life’s journey – becoming a physician at the VCU School of Medicine. Looking back over his first year of medical school at VCU, Payne says what struck him most was that while he has much to learn, his past experiences are already making a difference.   

“It can be very surprising how much you don’t know about medicine, about the foundations of it,” he says. “But the thing that has helped me the most is my experience with people and understanding how to interact with them, how to make them laugh when they’re in pain.”

Payne says he is the first member of his family to graduate college. That he is also becoming a doctor makes his rural West Virginia family proud. 

Regarding the scholarship he received, he said, “it still doesn’t feel real,” Payne says. “Knowing it’s merit-based, it really has instilled confidence and laid a foundation for me to feel like someone has confidence in my abilities to be successful.”

The scholarship also means he and his wife can raise a family without lingering debt.

“The scholarship means so much it’s almost hard to quantify and it gains more value the more I sit with it,” Payne says, then adds: “I’m glad I was deemed worthy of such a gift and whatever influenced someone to pick me, I hope I continue to reinforce those values.” 

Manna Haile

For VCU School of Medicine student Manna Haile, it’s a toss-up between the head and the heart.

The Alexandria, Virginia, native says cardiology and psychiatry are among the areas of medicine that interest her the most thus far, but regardless of which path she chooses, creating personal connections with patients is her priority. 

A good doctor can save someone’s life, Haile notes, but medical care is just part of that. Getting to know patients as people beyond their medical needs, and creating safe, trusting environments for patients can unlock issues that impact their overall health. 

“That personal connection is really important,” she says, explaining that she saw those relationships firsthand with her father, a pediatrician, as she grew up.

“They looked up to him, and they drew pictures and would give them to him,” she says about his young patients. “It was definitely influential in seeing how doctors can create personal relationships with their patients and then seeing the effect it had on them. I want to be able to do that someday.” 

Equally moving is how scholarships impact their recipients. Namely, she says, they provide opportunities for people who otherwise would not have a chance to attend medical school and, beyond that, allow recipients the freedom to choose the specialty area that most interests them, rather than an area that will be the most lucrative, thereby providing resources to pay down debt the quickest.

“It’s a big confidence boost, but it’s also a lifetime of freedom,” she says. “I’m not sure yet what I want to do but having the time to figure it out takes the pressure off. I have the freedom to choose to go where I want to reach the most people.”

As she wraps up her first year, Haile says the anxiety she felt leading up to the school year last summer quickly dissipated, thanks in large part to her peers. 

“Everybody understands that it’s a big transition so they’re all kind and willing to lend a helping hand,” she says. “It’s competitive, but people work together, and we all understand that helping someone else is not going to pull you down.” 

Hisham Vohra

Hisham Vohora was young when his father opened a free clinic in their hometown in Pakistan. The third child of four and the only boy, Vohra didn’t know then the impact that such a place would have on throngs of people within that community, people who previously had little or no access to medical services. 

What he saw in the following years when his family returned for visits was the sense that the local community trusted his father, and that his father was doing good for those around him. 

That is what inspired Vohra, as well as his two sisters, to pursue medicine on the MCV Campus.

Vohra says when he was notified via email that he received a scholarship, he thought he’d gotten it by accident. 

“I sent a screenshot to my sisters, and they were going crazy,” he says. “I was in denial for a while.”

He says the scholarship solidified his decision to earn his medical degree on the MCV Campus. 

“I’m happy to be near my family and I feel a lot less stressed about being in school,” says Vohra, who values preventative medicine and is leaning toward pediatrics. “I can go through distraction free and really just focus on what I’m passionate about rather than how am I going to pay back my loans.” 

He’s happy to be studying at an institution that’s such an integral part of its community with a wide variety of patients. He’s also interested in learning how medicine is practiced around the world, and he would like to explore other cultures to understand how the environment plays a role in health. “I want to make a difference,” Vohra says. “It’s hard for just one person to do that, but that’s my goal.”

If you would like to talk with someone about supporting scholarships at the VCU School of Medicine, please contact Nathan G. Bick, executive director of development, at ngbick@vcu.edu or (804) 827-0387.