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| Sarah Lea is following in her grandfather's footsteps. (Nick Pearce Photo) |
Sarah Lea isn’t the first member of her family to serve as president of the Dalhousie Medical Student Society. That honour goes to her grandfather, Dr. Gordon Lea (Class of 1938), decades before she arrived at Dalhousie.
“It’s neat that, in a sense, I’m following in his footsteps,” says Ms. Lea, whose grandfather passed away 10 years ago. “I’m sure that somewhere, he knows.”
Family matters a great deal to Ms. Lea, originally from Charlottetown, P.E.I. She credits her parents’ commitment to community service with her own drive to get involved. She says this was easy to do so in medical school.
“It’s an incredibly supportive environment here,” she says. “Once you start medical school, you feel like you’ve been accepted into a really special community, and you feel honoured to be a part of it.”
This isn’t her first Dal degree; she has both a BSc (honours) in Economics and a master’s degree in community health and epidemiology. But it’s in medicine where she felt most at home, taking advantage of international opportunities in Ghana and Tanzania and getting to serve on the advisory committee for the hiring of Dean Tom Marrie. She was also awarded the James Clarke Award in 2009 for leadership, service and advocacy to the student body of the medical school.
“I really believe that you get out of an experience what you put in, and I’ve gotten so much more out of medical school than I ever thought I would going in,” she says.
This July, she moves to Vancouver to start her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of British Columbia.