At Med Schools, a New Degree of Diversity

In the case of Med 4, its roots stretch to India (two students), Bangladesh (one), Austria (one) and Russia (one). The sole team member without a family narrative of recent arrival is African American.

The door to the team's office at the VA hospital humorously telegraphs an awareness that the people inside the windowless warren of cubicles, computers, backpacks and water bottles are not quite a random sample of America. Someone has taped on it a page from the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.

"Your doctor could be an alien! They're working undercover!" shouts the headline. Under it is a photo of four masked-and-gowned physicians -- one with dark space-creature eyes -- gathered around a supine patient.

Team 4's international coloration includes even its senior physician, Divya Shroff, an assistant professor of medicine at GW.

Her father immigrated from India to study chemical engineering in graduate school, returned to India to marry, then came back to the United States with his bride. Shroff and her younger brother and sister grew up in the Chicago suburbs but spent three years in New Delhi in the 1980s. Her brother is also a physician, her sister an investment banker.

"We were never forced into medicine," she said recently in her office at the VA hospital. "But in the Indian community in Chicago, everyone was a professional. Everyone was a doctor or an engineer."

She went from high school into a program at the University of Missouri where students got both a bachelor's degree and a medical degree in six years. Of the 10 people in her group, "maybe one was Caucasian," she recalled. The majority were Indians.

The culture of high expectation holds true for another South Asian on the team, resident Moneera Haque, who grew up in Bethesda with parents who immigrated from Bangladesh.

Haque, 30, has a doctorate in social work along with her medical degree. She recently presented a paper on "racial differences in utilization of cardiac rehabilitation" at a scientific meeting in New Orleans and another paper at a conference in Amsterdam. Her brother is a neurosurgeon.

In her household, the notion that education came first "was simply the way things were," Haque said while sipping a drink in a break room. "For me, that didn't seem like pressure." But she admitted she wasn't studying just for herself: "We have a sense of obligation to our parents to help them fulfill their dreams as well."

Alexandra Langer, a third-year medical student at GW, traced a distinctly different path.

Langer, 30, grew up in Yekaterinburg, in central Russia. Her father managed a pension fund, and her mother was a police officer. As a high school student, she aspired to become a doctor, but her parents talked her out of it.