Ivie Tokunboh AB '16

Introduction

My name is Ivie Tokunboh, my pronouns are she/her/hers. I’m Class of 2016 from Harvard and lived in Winthrop House. I studied Human Developmental Regenerative Biology for my concentration and got a secondary in Social Anthropology. I just finished my third year of medical school at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and I am now going to spend the next year at Harvard getting my Masters in Public Health with a focus on Health and Social Behavior. I’m also doing the Zuckerman Fellowship at the same time, which is for people who have or are working towards degrees in medicine, law, or business, who are getting additional degrees at Harvard in either Public Health or Public Policy, or Education. All of the fellows work on different projects oriented toward public service and come up with different goals to see what we can achieve through cross-career collaboration.

What has been one of your happiest moments in your career thus far?

I always feel overjoyed when I’m in the room with another patient, another Black patient especially, and they see me in the room as their provider. I just feel like they can trust me so much more: they can talk to me, open up to me, or they express those feelings. I had a patient say to me, “I’ve been told this before, but I did not understand why; thank you for making this make sense.” It’s just so common that people don’t know why they’re taking the medication they’re taking, why they’re doing what they’re doing or getting the imaging results that they need to get. So it’s nice when I get to have moments where I can actually talk with people and connect with them on a personal level, and then really make sure that they’re able to manage their own health independently. 

Another moment that was really joyful for me was on my OB-GYN rotation. The very first day in Labor and Delivery, I was able to help deliver a baby within an hour of getting there. The woman had already had a baby so it was a little bit easier for her going through labor. She actually was a young black woman, too, and she said to me, “Yeah totally, jump on in there!” It was the smoothest, quickest, easiest natural delivery, and I was so overjoyed that whole week of Labor and Delivery as I was able to support the new mom then.

How would you say your medical experiences have matched, exceeded, fell short, differed from your expectations like as an undergraduate?

I took two years off between graduating from Harvard and starting at UCSF. I already anticipated that medical school was going to be super hard. I knew I was going to enjoy what I was learning, but I thought that it was going to be so intense. What I have learned is that it really depends on the [medical] school that you go to. Some people seem relatively unhappy at their school, whereas I feel very happy at my school and very supported. Also, I thought I was going to have no time to keep in touch with my friends, like a “catch you in four years” type of thing, but I felt I was able to still keep up with those relationships. This is not to say that medical school is not rigorous or it’s not difficult or that you’re not going to have your moments of stress. I mean, studying for STEP was one of the worst periods of my life. But I think overall— depending on what school you go to— there will be a culture of people who are more supportive of one another and actually care about each other’s well-being, which may not have necessarily been there in undergrad. I feel really blessed to have had such a positive experience overall.

Speaking to pre-med courses I took in college, a part of me always knew that it wouldn’t make sense for me to stress [over] Organic Chemistry and General Chemistry and Physics because medicine is more about the interpersonal. It’s so important to have compassion and people skills, and it’s just not something that pre-med culture or pre-med classes prepare you for. To be honest, the pre-med curriculum  really overemphasizes science we don’t need and underemphasizes personal skills that we really do need. We have whole classes to practice giving bad news, telling someone that they’ve just been diagnosed with XYZ and seeing how the patient reacts to it. How are you comforting the patient? What are you saying? Are you listening? There are so many different tools that medical school classes give us to learn how to give hard news or listen to patients. Those types of things just never crossed my mind back in [college].

What has been your greatest challenge in your healthcare career thus far?

To preface, my healthcare career has lasted just three years, and I really only had one year of clinical time that was interrupted by COVID as well, [so] I spent a great deal of time online. Although I adapted quickly to COVID, having masks on you can’t really connect [with patients] the same way that you might have been able to previously. It was hard going from in-person the first three months of my clinical time to doing everything on Zoom. I was thinking, “Okay, the patients maybe don’t have scales so I can’t get their vital signs, or they don’t have a blood pressure cuff, so I can’t do that. I can’t [test] those reflexes, I can’t really test their muscle strength.” On another note, COVID has caused so much stress for healthcare providers. Even though I didn’t see COVID patients myself, just seeing the sort of impact that it’s had (I was on rotation in the ED recently), it’s just so hard to watch, to think about how physicians and other medical staff are putting their lives in so much danger. There’s been a much bigger mental burden as well.

Other challenges that I face personally include issues with insurance and how difficult it can be for patients: Patients may be less willing to— and myself included— come and be seen, because they know how much of a financial burden it’s going to be.

Who has been your greatest mentor in your career? 

My greatest mentor thus far has been Dr. Denise Davis. I met her my first year because she would host Women of Color in Medicine dinners. In terms of my career progression, she is absolutely amazing. A phenomenal internal medicine physician, a Black woman, super kind, super thoughtful, and really interested in creating community and advancing equity. She has been someone who I could go to with any question I have about my career, whether it be about wanting to put me in touch with people or if I needed to apply for a scholarship. She’s somebody who really wants to guide young medical students and help them achieve their goals, and she gives them advice others might not spend the time to give. When I was telling her, “I feel like I need to take a year off, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do,” she was the one who put [it] in my mind: “I feel like you should do a Masters of Public Health.” I always like to joke that she has a third eye. She just knows things beyond what you may even realize.

Core values?

I really value my patients having their own self empowerment, starting from knowing what’s going on with their health. I want everyone to be able to advocate for themselves. I’m also passionate about health equity, which entails making sure everyone has equal access to health care services and [gets] equitable care, especially for Black and brown underserved communities.

With who I am as an individual, I say the three C’s: Community, Creativity and Christianity. Community: I think it’s really important wherever you are to build a community and have people that you can rely on, [who] can support you, that you can have fun with and feel included in. Creativity: I love dancing and singing and the arts and really appreciate those types of things; I like different mediums of expression. I think that’s definitely a core value that I want to incorporate into my future career as well. If I do Neurology, I know that helping patients with Parkinson’s [through] dance classes helps them control their body movements, so I think it’d be cool to incorporate art in with medicine. I’m a Christian, so I’m always trying to keep a mind of service and helping others get to where they need to go by lifting them up.

It was actually Dr. Denise Davis who asked me what my core values are in life. We were just having a regular old conversation, and she was like, “What are your core values in life? Just think about it right now, and tell me right now.” She gave me five minutes. It was crazy to me that someone would ask me what my core values are in casual conversation, but it was really cool that she did that. Now, I’ve started doing that to other people too, asking, “Hey, what are your core values in life?”

Ivie Tokunboh 

AB 2016 | Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology 

MPH 2022

Compiled and Interviewed by Christine Lee