At the 2025 National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA) conference in June, a man from the audience congratulated UC Riverside School of Medicine student Joslyn Santana and her mother after Santana received an award. “He said, ‘When I see your daughter go up there, I can see my daughter,’” Santana recalled. “It’s a reminder that representation is so important, because you never know what younger generations are watching and are able to see themselves in a different way because of you.”
Santana, SOM Class of 2027, never considered pursuing medicine when she was younger precisely because of a lack of representation. “With a lot of the doctors that we interacted with in the U.S., I always felt very detached, like there was a language barrier and cultural barrier,” she said. Growing up in San Bernardino County with Peruvian immigrant parents, Santana said her mother learned about nutrition from a Spanish-language radio station and would drive to Tijuana, Mexico to see physicians that spoke Spanish.
Finding, and becoming, representation in medicine
Santana saw representation in medicine for the first time when she transferred to UCLA as an undergraduate and joined the student group Chicanos for Community Medicine (CCM). Through mentorship sessions with local medical schools, “we got to listen to LMSA (Latino Medical Student Association) medical students come and share their stories of how they went into medicine and all the barriers that can come up, but that you can still make it,” Santana said. “I started to finally see that medicine was a possibility.”
Working with low-income, Spanish-speaking patients in Los Angeles and Tecate, Mexico with the Latino Student Health Project in CCM also inspired Santana to pursue medicine. “I could see my family in a lot of the patients that we served, or similar struggles, and so for me that made medicine more meaningful,” she said.
Santana applied to UCLA for medical school but wasn’t accepted, which she now calls a blessing in disguise. On her next attempt, she was admitted to UCR after participating in its Future Physician Leaders program, one of the school’s Pathway Programs that provides volunteer opportunities and supports premedical students on their journey to medical school. “You can read UCR’s mission on the website, but I feel like it's very different when you're actually working with people who are at the institution and putting actions to the words,” Santana said. “It made me realize that UCR does really care about the mission that it has.”
Coming full circle
As a medical student, Santana immediately joined UCR’s LMSA branch and became a mentor like the ones that inspired her as an undergraduate. “It was very surreal but also very fulfilling, because it felt like a full circle moment,” she said. “Whenever I think of LMSA, I want to serve that mission of empowering my community and providing support when I can, and being the type of mentor or colleague that I would like to have or wished I had in the past.”
She also continued working toward her personal mission of serving the Latino community as a physician. Volunteering at the Coachella Valley Free Clinic, Santana connected directly with Spanish-speaking patients and community health workers, known as promotoras. The experience taught Santana about the impact of community health worker programs while providing her with another pillar of support.
“Whenever med school was getting really tough or I felt like I constantly questioned myself, the promotoras would always give me, in Spanish, endearing terms like ‘mija,’ and those little things just reminded me, ‘this is why you're doing this,’” Santana said. “Med school is a lot of books and technical science terms, but at the end of the day you need to be able to apply this to help the community--the community that drove why you're in medicine.”
Taking a break and earning awards
Following her second year of medical school, Santana decided to take a brief leave of absence to reflect and return with renewed purpose. During that time, her Longitudinal Ambulatory Care Experience (LACE) preceptor nominated her for the 2025 NHMA Medical Student of the Year Award, which she won. “It was a moment to remind myself of all the stuff that I've been doing and why,” Santana said.
Soon after, she also received one of five Herbert W. Nickens Medical Student Scholarships awarded at the Association of American Medical Colleges annual Learn Serve Lead Conference in San Antonio, which helped inspire her to continue representing her community as a physician. “It is a heavy responsibility, but it's important to slowly contribute to a shift in the demographics that tend to make up medicine,” she said. “Just being a Latina physician, I know a lot of people are going to be able to connect to that, especially in the Latino community.”
Despite her initial concern about falling behind her classmates, Santana came to recognize her leave as beneficial. “At first I saw the leave as a failure, but then it actually gave me the space to be aware of those opportunities to apply to those awards and to work more in my community,” she said.
Denise Martinez, MD, associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and faculty advisor for LMSA at the UCR SOM, also emphasized the value of a leave of absence. “I was very proud of her for taking that step and doing what is right in her own life,” Martinez said of Santana’s choice. “A lot of times students feel like just one thing will completely derail their career and they won't be able to do what they want to do, but that's actually not true at all,” Martinez continued. Santana “already has contributed to the health of folks within the Inland Empire, and I am very assured that in the future, she'll be a wonderful doctor who will take care of patients in this space and be a real, true advocate.”
Taking leave provided the additional benefit of allowing Santana to explore her clinical interests. While shadowing a pediatric dermatologist during her time away from school, she found herself paying close attention to the psychological and emotional impact of chronic skin conditions on patients. Santana is now exploring residency training in psychiatry with a strong interest in child and community-focused care, and plans to continue conducting community-engaged research.
Dedicated to the region’s future
“Because my roots are so deep in the IE, I feel like even if I were to go away for a few years for a fellowship or a residency program, I would want to come back to make my home in the IE,” Santana said of her future plans. “I know I can have a longstanding impact here in this region.”
Santana also hopes to continue contributing as a mentor. She already helps inspire other students by sharing her perspective as a nontraditional medical student through the NHMA Mentorship Program, the Medical Organization for Latino Advancement Mentorship Program, and the MiMentor Medical School Readiness Program. “There are moments where I get self conscious about my age, but then I remember that there's so much life experience that has helped me to better understand patients,” she explained.
And like her personal dedication to serving her community, Santana encourages other students to find their own purpose. “I try to encourage them that medicine is going to be long, and to take their time with developing something that they themselves can connect to that will carry them through those times where it's going to get hard,” she said.
Santana said that attending UCR has helped her to thrive and, in turn, to make her family and her ancestors proud. “I definitely would not have been able to make those achievements had I not gone to UCR, which I feel like kind of brings me back to it being a blessing in disguise, that I just need to trust God and that my grandparents and my ancestors are guiding me even if maybe I don't see it at the time,” she said. She remembers her family each time she sees a local patient and with each award she wins, which she sets on the family altar alongside photos of her grandparents who passed away when she was young. “I don't think of them as mine,” Santana said of her awards. “I always place them on the altar as an offering to my grandparents.”
“I definitely feel proud, as the years have gone by and the self doubt subsides… I’ve been receiving so much support and validation, whether it's through awards or conferences where I get to really talk to people and get a sense of the bigger community, and it grounds me,” Santana added. “I feel like it's all falling into place, and I'm definitely grateful to be a part of UCR SOM.”
