By Mariah Bennett | Staff Writer
With over a decade of being active under its belt, the Multicultural Association of Prehealth Students (MAPS) meets biweekly from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Mondays in Room B110 of the Baylor Sciences Building. The student-run organization currently has around 100 members.
The mission of MAPS is to provide its members with opportunities to explore, learn and appreciate the different backgrounds that shape patients and health care professionals.
Kailua, Hawaii, senior and MAPS vice president Sean Duval-Arnould said via email that members focus on academics while fostering an intimate sense of community that celebrates all cultural backgrounds.
“My favorite part about being in this organization definitely boils down to the people and the sense of community,” Duval-Arnould said. “We’re a smaller pre-health org — and one that welcomes and embraces people of all backgrounds and cultures.”
Arlington senior and MAPS Pipeline chair Kaitlin Nguyen said one of the goals of MAPS is to increase diversity in the realm of health care at Baylor. Additionally, she said that diversity doesn’t stop at racial identity and that people can be represented through cultures or other things they experience at Baylor.
“MAPS really caught my eye because, being a student of color at Baylor, I think it’s kind of hard to sometimes feel at home or feel some sort of structure there,” Nguyen said. “After seeing MAPS, I saw people who not only looked like me but also were raised like me in some sort of way.”
Duval-Arnould said MAPS has felt like a home for him inside of Baylor’s vast and daunting pre-health community.
“I’m French, and finding an organization within the pre-health community my freshman year was extremely intimidating, especially as someone not familiar with Texan culture,” Duval-Arnould said. “MAPS was one of the only organizations that warmly reached out to me and made me feel truly welcomed into their social sphere.”
Another goal of the organization is to facilitate service opportunities for members, which will prepare students to provide for the health care needs of individuals from varying backgrounds, cultures and socioeconomic levels.
“[We] provide a bunch of medical resources like being able to shadow physicians,” Nguyen said. “We also have a mentorship program that’s available that allows us to connect our members with people who are actually in medical school.”
Nguyen said MAPS offers additional resources, such as guest speakers from medical schools or the medical field, ethics and suturing workshops, socials and other events. Additionally, it facilitates volunteering opportunities with the Salvation Army, a soup kitchen and a nursing home.
Nguyen said she primarily focuses on the MAPS Pipeline program. According to Duval-Arnould, Pipeline is a mentorship program aimed at increasing STEM interest in underserved student populations in the Waco Independent School District, including Chavez Middle School, Indian Springs Middle School and Tennyson Middle School.
“We go through all of those middle schools at least once a week, and we mentor students who want to learn more about the medical field,” Nguyen said. “We’ll do activities like giving them short lectures on what doctors do, and … what type of career paths are open to them.”
Duval-Arnould said he has participated in the Pipleline program since freshman year, and it is his favorite activity in MAPS. He said he enjoys bonding with students over the years and seeing them grow into their academic and professional curiosities.
“A lot of these students grow up without seeing positive role models in academia — or any professional in higher education or medicine — and Pipeline offers them to see mentors who also look and may come from similar cultural backgrounds as them succeeding in STEM,” Duval-Arnould said.
Nguyen said an issue that needs to be addressed in the field is a lack of diversity. She said addressing those ideas within MAPS — especially within the Baylor bubble — is a goal they have to foster community as well.
“This is a really competitive field to be in,” Nguyen said. “So being able to build those forms of community with one another and unity is something that we’re really looking forward to.”
