Graduating from medical school is a major milestone for any aspiring physician, marking a student’s transition from the classroom to residency at one of thousands of accredited programs nationwide.
This year’s senior class at Perelman School of Medicine — the Class of 2026 — is set to graduate on May 17. Ahead of next month’s commencement, The Daily Pennsylvanian interviewed three outgoing medical students about how Penn shaped their academic journeys and plans beyond medical school.
Fourth-year Medical School student Osahon Iyamu spent his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning degrees in neuroscience and chemistry before coming to Penn.
Iyamu explained that while his initial interest in medicine came from watching his father’s training, it was the passing of his mother when he was a teenager that ultimately drew him to the field.
“I wanted to be a doctor and provider to others so that others didn’t have to go through what my mom unfortunately had to go through while she was at the hospital,” Iyamu told the DP. “So I wanted to be someone that could be a familiar face and help people get the appropriate care that they deserve and need.”
Each year, approximately 35 incoming students at the Medical School are offered a full-ride, merit-based scholarship through the Twenty-First Century Scholars Program. Iyamu described the scholarship as “life-changing.”
“It gave me an opportunity that I otherwise wouldn’t have had,” he said. “It allowed me to pursue my passions and figure out what I wanted to do.”
On campus, Iyamu served as the co-president of the Penn Student National Medical Association, working with a cardiology interest group to host health fairs and provide student mentorship opportunities. He was also involved with the nonprofit Philly Student Doctors, which seeks to empower Black health professionals.
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Black doctors make up roughly 6% of all doctors in the United States. Iyamu said that being surrounded by so many other students of color at Penn and interacting with physicians of color through academic programming was “truly amazing.”
“My role is to try and bridge the gaps of care that already exist in [Black] communities, while also being a familiar face to help empower people to take back control of their health,” he added.
After graduation, Iyamu will return to Philadelphia to complete an internal medicine residency at Penn Medicine.
“I think Philly is a wonderful community of people, and for the kind of training that I will be receiving through my internal medicine program, I thought it was a perfect fit for me to grow my knowledge base,” Iyamu explained. “Living here will give me a lot of grounding in the kind of care that I want to provide patients in whatever area of the country I do end up living in the future.”
M.D. and Ph.D candidate at the Medical School Shovik Bandyopadhyay has spent the last eight years studying at Penn. He completed two years at the Medical School, then pursued a graduate degree in cellular and molecular biology before returning to finish his medical studies this spring.
Bandyopadhyay grew up in West Virginia and was raised by two economics professors. He told the DP that his interest in medicine stemmed from having several loved ones diagnosed with cancer.
As an undergraduate, he attended Purdue University as a biology major. After graduating in 2017, he spent a year pursuing a fully-funded master’s degree at the University of Cambridge under the Churchill Scholarship before coming to Penn.
“I joined a lab when I was 18, and now, 13 years later, I’m still doing blood cell and blood cancer research,” Bandyopadhyay said.
He explained that dividing his years at the Medical School allowed him to gain clinical insight that shaped his Ph.D. research.
Bandyopadhyay added that his first two years at Penn were a “unique” experience because they overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I started my Ph.D. in the middle of COVID,” he said. “But it worked out well because I was almost forced to do more computational research because we were locked at home, and obviously, lab work and biology research is harder to do.”
Bandyopadhyay highlighted the support Penn’s M.D.-Ph.D. program provided while navigating studying during the pandemic. He explained that Penn helped him navigate both the mentor selection and the research process for his postdoctoral studies.
“[It] made me feel very, sort of secure that even though the world is burning down around us, that I’m going to get to where I’m going and be okay at the end,” Bandyopadhyay said.
After finishing his doctoral studies in 2023, Bandyopadhyay came back to clinics to finish medical school. While older than many of his peers, Bandyopadhyay said taking time away to complete his Ph.D. allowed him to bring a “scientific perspective” to the clinical side of medicine.
Following graduation, Bandyopadhyay will complete an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, ultimately working towards a career as an independent investigator studying blood cancers.
Kansas City native Owen Parra — who studied neuroscience and psychology at Tulane University — described falling “in love” with public health during his undergraduate years while working at a small public health clinic that did STI testing and HIV initiatives.
Parra took on a full-time job at the clinic after graduating, researching barriers to care for various underserved communities. He described the personal interactions he had — including with LGBTQ+ individuals, people experiencing homelessness, and those dealing with substance abuse disorder — as his motivation for pursuing medicine.
“I realized I can do a lot of public health work through medicine, and I can interact more directly with patients and have a greater impact on them,” he said.
Parra said that he wasn’t set on Penn Med until the day of his interview.
“There was something about my interview day at Penn — it just really stuck out,” Parra said. “The people I talked with just really seemed like my kind of people.”
He also said that he liked the pace of the Medical School’s curriculum, which allowed students “into the clinic a lot earlier than other programs.”
During his four years at Penn, Parra spearheaded a project to provide gender neutral bathrooms at the Medical School as part of “Penn Med Pride” and worked with the Center for Surgical Health and the Penn Refugee Clinic to help immigrants navigate emergency surgeries.
He also did a global health rotation in Botswana.
“A lot of programs have global health work, but Penn has an actual partnership with the University of Botswana, and it’s a really well-structured program that we are easily integrated into that community,” Parra explained. “You have automatic connections on a whole different side of the world.”
Following graduation, Parra plans to pursue an internal medicine residency at New York University, focusing on infectious diseases.
“Penn was really supportive in exploring different specialties, because I came in pretty undifferentiated,” Parra explained.
He added that medical school taught him how to “go with the flow.”
“I’ve learned to just be very open-minded to everything, be willing to explore, be willing to change plans, be willing to adapt to whatever situation you get put in, because with medicine, you just never know,” he said.
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Staff reporter Sameeksha Panda covers Penn Medicine and can be reached at panda@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies chemistry.
