While medical school can be an enriching experience for many, it can be isolating for some.
For many Black students aspiring to pursue medicine or currently pursuing medicine at a medical school in Ontario, time spent in lecture halls where representation is limited and on online forums that amplify anxiety about grades and acceptance rates, the journey toward becoming a physician can quickly become overwhelming.
The Queen’s Black Pre-Medical Association (QBPA), a student-led organization at Queen’s, aims to change that by providing mentorship, networking opportunities, and community-building events, including its annual conference “Representation Matters” on March 28, to help students navigate the pre-medical path.
In an interview with The Journal, Nnamdi Jr. Ndubuka, ArtSci ‘28, and the club’s conference coordinator shared QBPA’s emphasis on building community.
“I’d describe QBPA as a group of like-minded students who are all pursuing the goal to become healthcare professionals. It’s really a place just to foster a community. Resilience and community are a big part of being an underrepresented minority and QBPA is a club that offers that community and that mentorship for students to hopefully reach the goals of becoming physicians.”
Exclusionary practices targeted towards Black students in medicine in Ontario isn’t new, with Queen’s School of Medicine being responsible for banning the admittance of Black students in 1918. Though the ban was lifted in 1965, it wasn’t repealed until recently in 2018.
Despite Black people accounting for 6.4 per cent of the national population, they comprise only 1.7 per cent of Canadian medical students.
A 2022 CMAJ study revealed that this underrepresentation is caused by a myriad of factors, the most prevalent being some form of discrimination or racism. According to the study, 59 per cent of respondents had at least one personal encounter with discrimination in medical school.
Furthermore, a longitudinal study set in an undisclosed Canadian medical school revealed that Black and minority students of colour facing daily microaggressions from their peers often didn’t report such instances for fear of having their claims dismissed or lacking access to proper institutional supports.
However, these feelings of “otherness” at academic institutions ripple far. “Minority tax,” a phenomenon experienced by Black faculty at Canadian universities, explains how individuals are often burdened with promoting diversity at their institutions at the expense of pursuing traditional scholarly work more highly esteemed in academia.
A 2017 study on the experiences of racialized faculty in Canadian academia highlighted that universities reproduce the accepted social hierarchy in which non-white minorities are excluded and marginalized.
But academic settings aren’t where all the challenge is faced; social media can also be an intimidating place for students, as online forums distort expectations about what it takes to get into medical school. With individuals brandishing their academic accomplishments, or others leaving comments on posts to bring others down because of one bad mark.
“You see so many things on [social media] that it can really horrify you,” he said. “But having people [at QBPA] who are basically there at the steps of applying, you get to see, here’s what they’ve done, here’s where they’re at. It’s different to what people see online.”
That exposure offers reassurance. The need for community is amplified by structural challenges faced by Black students in medicine and undergraduate studies.
“The underrepresentation is a big challenge that we [Black students] face here because representation will allow you to have great network opportunities and even potential shadowing opportunities,” Ndubuka said.
These barriers to success can impede students’ self-esteem, which can even affect their academic performance.
“A lot of times, even feeling incompetent simply because of your skin, as silly as it may sound, it’s a reality for many Black pre-med students,” Ndubuka noted.
For Black students unsure that medicine’s the right path for them, Ndubuka adds, “Just go all in. Just go all in as if you do believe this is for you.”
QBPA’s willingness to “go all in” is strengthened by seeing themselves reflected in the future of medicine in Canada—and supporting each other along the way.
Tags
Black Community, clubs on campus, medical school, medicine, Queen's Black Premedical Association
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MD
As someone practicing in the profession these students hope to enter, I read this piece with some unease. It begins from the premise that black students are structurally excluded from medicine, yet it never actually addresses how admissions currently function.
Over the past several years, Queen’s and other Canadian medical schools have implemented explicit race-based pathways intended to increase black representation. Until recently, Queen’s operated an accelerated pathway restricted to black and Indigenous applicants. These weren’t symbolic gestures, because they changed how candidates were assessed and how seats were allocated. That context is entirely absent. One would not know, from reading this article, that admissions policies have already been adjusted to materially benefit the very groups described as excluded.
If exclusion remains the claim, it needs to be defined in 2026 terms. When schools introduce identity-specific streams, what does structural exclusion look like now? Who, exactly, is being excluded, and by what mechanism? Those are questions any serious discussion of admissions should confront.
Because medicine, for better or worse, isn’t a campus club. It’s a public profession premised on competence. Patients tend to assume their physician met consistent standards; they’re generally less interested in the colour of their skin than their clinical knowledge and bedside manner. If race is an explicit factor in admissions decisions, institutions (and the journalists covering them) might consider explaining how that coexists with a system that insists on uniform rigour…
To the article’s credit, it does accurately capture the difficulty of the pre-med path: the feelings of inadequacy, social media anxiety, competitive online forums. All true. Also all universal. Medical admissions are punishing for nearly everyone who applies. Acceptance rates are low, and rejection is common, so it’s hardly surprising that students look for any distinguishing feature, any advantage, that might improve their odds. But interpreting these familiar pressures as proof of structural exclusion requires a bit more than anecdotes.
Community organizations should offer mentorship and solidarity, and that’s commendable. But when sweeping claims about systemic barriers are made, they should be examined with the same discipline we claim to value in medicine: define the problem and examine data. Otherwise, we risk diagnosing on narrative alone, which, in my line of work, is generally discouraged 😉