Melina Manolas

I enrolled in Cornell's Urban Semester program because I was curious about the relationship between opportunity structure and the distribution of illness, as well as how social forces become embodied as individual experiences of suffering. Through experiential learning and ethnographic studies in an urban setting, I became aware of the importance of context to health. I feel that this program challenged me to consider the hierarchy of suffering that exists, in which socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability translate to biological risk.

 

In total, the Urban Semester reinforced my longing to become a physician

who adds holistic context to the image of each patient.