Cuban native Camila Lage Chavez says Rochester’s hands-on approach and diversity have prepared her well for the future.
Choosing the University of Rochester was the easy part for Camila Lage Chavez ’21 (T5). Getting to the River Campus tested her resiliency.
“I was visiting my father in Ecuador (in 2015), and the US embassy gave me a list of 25 American colleges,” the Havana, Cuba, native says. “I started looking up what they offered students, and if they had things I was looking for in a college. My list got smaller and smaller, and when I watched a virtual tour of UR, I knew I wanted to go there.”
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But there were challenges. Lage Chavez didn’t have internet access in Cuba, so she paid $20 for a 24-hour plan spread over a month. She didn’t have a credit card to pay for her application, so Rochester delayed her fee. And snail mail was so slow she didn’t find out she had been accepted until two months later.
“It was challenging,” she says, “but UR helped me over every hurdle.”
One hurdle remained when she landed in America. The plane ticket her dad reserved for her was for Rochester, Minnesota. She had to make a quick change at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago before arriving in New York.
Lage Chavez is believed to be the first Rochester undergraduate to come directly from Cuba. She majored in molecular genetics and is nearing the end of a Take Five Scholars Program called “Globalization through the Lens of Race, Discrimination, and Identity” that examines the Latino experience in America. “I wanted to take a gap year between college and medical school, and Take Five seemed like a really good opportunity,” she says.
While an undergraduate, she was involved in the Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) for four years and was a teaching assistant for chemistry and biology classes.
Lage Chavez was in Rochester when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the University to move all classes to remove learning. She found an apartment near campus and completed the semester like all University students—remotely. She hasn’t seen her family since December 2019. “It’s been challenging,” she says. “I’ve taken all of my classes off campus this year. It’s sad compared to a ‘normal’ year, but I think the school has done a great job to make it as close to that as it can.”
Rochester was the first school she applied to, and it has lived up to her expectations. “It may be smaller than some schools, but it has the resources of a big school,” she says. “I was able to connect with my professors and build relationships, which led to research positions in labs.”
Lage Chavez is applying to medical schools and hopes to become a doctor serving minority populations in the United States.
“The University of Rochester has prepared me for my future,” she says. “Being able to go to class and then apply what you’ve just learned in a laboratory setting—I didn’t think I could do that. And the diversity of the students will help me when I’m treating patients that are different than me. It’s the friendships, the connections, and the knowledge I’ll most remember.”
