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Caitlin Polley
"In Ecuador, I encountered children with such rotted teeth that they could not chew the anti-parasitic medication that I offered them. I learned that infrastructure and education are as essential to healthcare as pills."
- Program: 2005 Graduate Scholarship Recipient
- Resides: Philadelphia, PA
- Hometown: Bethel Park, PA
- Age: 27
- Four-year College or University: University of Notre Dame
- Graduate School: University of Pennsylvania
- Academic/Career Pursuits: Health Care, International NGO/Relations, Languages, Literature, Medical Practitioner, Nonprofits, Philosophy, Public Policy, Religion, Social Science / Anthropology
- Other Interests: Church / Religious Organization, Foreign Languages / International Study, Volunteer Work
Biography
Caitlin Polley credits her small Catholic high school with providing her a safe space to blossom and enabling her to overcome acute shyness. She responded by helping kindergartners and working at countless church festivals. Once at Notre Dame, besides earning a near-perfect GPA and election to Phi Beta Kappa, she volunteered at an outreach center for South Bend's Hispanics, initially to satisfy a service requirement for her Spanish class. The experience, though, changed her. She says, "I slowly and painfully overcame self-consciousness and began to venture a few Spanish phrases." She later recruited more volunteers and ultimately became president of the Community Alliance to Serve Hispanics.
From there, Caitlin sought out more challenges through summer jobs in an impoverished Louisiana bayou town, then in a mountain town high in the Andes. "I witnessed striking natural beauty alongside a poverty that was simply ugly," she says, and saw villages with "gorgeous waterfalls but no running water." Today, she works at a Catholic Worker house, Casa Juan Diego in Houston, getting food to people who haven't eaten in days, whose feet are blistered and infected by days of walking. She sits and listens "as the ladies erupt with stories of battering husbands," and cry about children they left behind in order to travel to the US to earn money to send them to school.
Caitlin knows the meaning of such encounters will guide her professional life. In medical school, she wants to learn not just what ails the body but what ails the healthcare delivery system, especially "healthcare for underserved populations."
Other Scholars Like Caitlin
Esmeralda Duran
Graduate Scholar
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris
Katsiaryna Pleshankova
Undergraduate Transfer Scholar
University of Rochester
Charlene Gomez
Undergraduate Transfer Scholar
University of California-Los Angeles
Huma Saeed
Graduate Scholar
London School of Economics