A college experience focused on growth and exposure
Dr. Levy: I was impressed by the distinction between your experience at Xavier University where there was a lot of support and guidance and help in your premed program, and what happened to you when you hit medical school.
Dr. Johnson: Xavier University in Louisiana is the number 1 institution in the country for getting minorities into professional school. They understand that they have kids that are brilliant but underprepared, and just have not had the background to actually tackle some of these tough curriculums. I always had good grades in school. But by not being challenged, I didn’t know what I didn’t really know. So now that I was seeing biology, chemistry for the first time, and trying to tackle it; there’s a failure point. I didn’t know how to take tests, and I didn’t know how to study properly. The harder I tried, the worse things got for me.
Xavier has seen that story a multitude of times. If I went to a bigger or predominantly White university, a counselor would have told me, “Well, medicine’s maybe not for you. You can’t handle a premed curriculum.” Instead, I said, “Listen, I’m studying. I’m doing all of these things, and I’m not hacking it.” And they broke it down: “Let’s get you into study groups with kids that have had these type of AP classes before. We’ll have you watch how they study,” and everything started to click. That facilitation of how to adjust to this curriculum was a godsend. It’s the only reason I’m here. I am a prime example of being brilliant enough to be able to do it, but needing the infrastructure and a system set up.
Dr. Levy: There’s a great book by Carol Dweck called Mindset that talks about education of young kids and putting them into silos so early in life; the brilliant kids go into the AP courses and the rest are labeled as inadequate. It’s assumed in a fixed mindset based on their heredity and IQ, and not based on the fact that they have not been exposed to the right things.
Xavier was growing you into the man who could, in fact, do all of those things. I think that is one of the systemic and structural issues that we have—that fixed mindset that frames a kid who is not succeeding as therefore unable to succeed, as opposed to framing that child as not having the correct tools.
New tribulations of medical school
Dr. Johnson: Absolutely. I think what Xavier did for me is to at least let me understand what I needed to do, how to comprehend and retain information, which I never had been exposed to before. Those years were very important to establishing a foundation. When going to medical school, it was like, “There’s no more excuses. What could be the problem now?” Well, now let’s talk about taking tests—a whole different skill. Xavier focused on getting me to understand how to structure my thought process and knowledge base. In medical school I had to apply those skills (because if you can’t apply them, there’s no fit).
My second through fourth year of medical school, I was the only African-American kid in my class. I was spending 20-hour days sometimes just studying, trying to overcompensate by knowing as much as I possibly could and thinking that would propel me from the test-taking standpoint. Even though I didn’t have a lot of classmates in medical school that looked like me, I did have mentors that looked similarly, who really saw potential in me. Dr. Frederick Horvath, a nephrologist in Peoria said, “What are you doing? I want you to get out of these books, and let’s go out to lunch.”
He ended up buying me some instrumental books, really talked to me, listening to my background and understanding how driven I was as a person. He took me under his wing for the rest of medical school and said, “This is how you navigate through these spaces. Yes, you need to have a fund of knowledge to be able to take these tests, but you need to start understanding how to apply it to these questions.” I’m forever grateful to Dr. Horvath for doing that because it was a point in time where I was lost and struggling.
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