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| Med Students Showcase
Neighborhood Talent
The students, meanwhile, saw the event as a vehicle that could not only showcase local talent, but also inform neighbors of the many resources—free clinics, after-school programs and the like—Hopkins has to offer. On March 10, first-year medical student Shantanu Nundy and his classmates turned that vision into reality, as nearly 500 people of all ages filed into Turner Auditorium for the first East Baltimore Community Talent Show, featuring singing, dancing, poetry, rap and comedy. Lining Turner Concourse were information booths touting free health clinics, academic and tutoring groups, and community-based health organizations. The crowd was lively. They hooted and hollered for the jazz dance performance staged by Tench Tilghman Elementary School students. They went wild as Regina Jones, of the Parent-Teacher Association at Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary School, belted out Gladys Knight’s “You’re the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me.” And when an urban dance troupe from Collington Square Elementary School took the stage, they jumped in their seats and roared. “It was an energized crowd, and it kept growing,” said first-year student Claude Beaty, emcee for the evening along with classmate Alice Yao. “Every time we came out, there were more people.” The attendance was robust because the first-year students had assiduously contacted community groups, recruited the talent acts and distributed tickets. Mindi Levin, director of the new Student Outreach Resource Center (SOURCE) (see box), helped with logistics.
In the audience was Gail Brown, a surgical tech in the Weinberg operating rooms, who brought daughters Hope, 4, and Faith, 9 months, to see their older sister, Chanel, 10, perform with the Tench Tilghman Triumph Dancers. “The show went well beyond my expectations,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Guest speaker Ben Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery, urged students to ignore negative peer pressure and concentrate on developing their natural talents—their brains. “Make sure you educate yourself and learn things in depth,” he said. “That’s how you make yourself valuable.” Nundy has a family friend, Deepa Narayan, who is the lead author of a three-volume series produced by the World Bank called Voices of the Poor. In her work, which seeks to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor, Narayan says that rather than decide what’s best for people in need, ask them what is of interest. In planning the event, Nundy found this to be sage advice. “We wanted to make sure community members knew about all the free health clinics run by Hopkins. But the neighborhood groups told us, That’s nice, but what I really want to know is what my kids can do after school.” Nundy says not only did the students want the ideas to come from the community, “but we also hoped that our current community groups would start to change the way they operate by starting a dialogue with those they were created to help.” The student organizers reached out to guests, distributing surveys to all present and talking with selected individuals to gauge the response to the show. “For many, this was the first time they had set foot on our campus. I think they left with a positive image of an institution they long feared and were skeptical of,” says Nundy. “They left thinking, You know what, Hopkins does do a lot of great things for our community. It’s full of people who care about us and are trying to help us.” Nundy believes the East Baltimore Community Talent Show represents a rare open invitation to all area residents to come to Hopkins for an event of any type. He hopes it won’t be the last. “My hope is that this event will become an annual one, a tradition passed on from one first-year medical school class to the next.” —Karen Blum |
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