Dr. Ben Carson

            There are many African Americans that could and should be recognized; however, I selected a man whose life story I take special interest in because one day I aspire to be a neurosurgeon. I choose Dr. Ben Carson.
             Benjamin S. Carson, Sr. M.D. was born in 1951 in Detroit, Michigan into a life surrounded with poverty and racism. Although his family had several adversities, Dr. Carson's mother never allowed him to see himself as a victim, instead she constantly encouraged him to excel and did not accept excuses for failure.
             As a teenager Dr. Carson discovered God and the force that he has in his life after trying to stab another kid to death. According to him, it was this incident that turned his young life around. After dealing with his violent temper and poor school grades he rose from the bottom to the top of his class. His hard work and achievements earned him academic scholarships to college and medical school.
             Unfortunately, once in medical Dr. Carson's life was not easy; on the contrary, he did extremely poor on his first set of comprehensive exams and was advised by a counselor that he did not belong in medical school and was encouraged to drop out. As you could imagine, Dr. Carson refers to this as "a crisis in his life" but instead of giving up he continued to believe in his potential and made a decision to do the things that worked for him and not try to fit into somebody else's mold. This new way of thinking allowed him to breeze through the rest of medical school and gave him the insight to tap into his gifts and talents that led him to making a decision to becoming a world renowned African-American Neurosurgeon. .
             As a world-class surgeon after completing Yale and the University of Michigan School of Medicine, in 1984 at the age of 33 Ben Carson, M.D. was appointed as director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution, which made him the youngest physician to ever lead a major division.