Taylor Brothers

“I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was 10,” begins Taylor Brothers (Pre-Health ’24). That was the year she dislocated her knee in basketball practice and had an awe-inspiring trip to the orthopedic. “I thought, ‘This is so cool!’” she recalls. The challenging path to a medical career had begun. Following a planned break that she took after college, Taylor searched for a post-baccalaureate pre-health program that would serve as an academic refresher and GPA boost to strengthen her medical school application. Penn’s Pre-Health Post-Baccalaureate Programs offered her the curriculum, support, and extracurricular opportunities she needed to be a competitive medical school applicant.

Though her career goal was set at a young age, Taylor knows her path to medical school has been non-traditional. “I’ve worked full time since I was 15,” she says, and in addition to juggling school and work, she also took care of her two younger brothers, all of which impacted her academic journey.

After high school, Taylor attended community college, then the University of Maryland where she majored in psychology in the pre-med track and minored in neuroscience, initially following a fascination with neurosurgery. A college shadowing opportunity with a general practitioner then piqued her interest in patient care. “I realized I really love talking to patients,” she notes, leaning into her customer skills from her food services job. She also gained medical career inspiration while interning with Partners in Print, a bilingual workshop program in the DC area. “We helped parents whose first language isn’t English, and their kids, navigate the education system, where there's quite a large language barrier,” she says, which creates social disparities. Working with so many native Spanish speakers, she realized, “If I want to be a better doctor, I need to learn Spanish.”

While Taylor managed to fit in valuable extracurriculars when she could, and while she continued to be motivated to someday practice medicine, her divided time juggling school, work, and her home life meant she couldn’t be fully devoted to her studies. “I missed out on a lot of opportunities in college,” she shares. It was difficult to get to office hours or arrange meetings with instructors, for example, and as graduation approached, her advisors told her that her GPA was not good enough to get into medical school. “By the end of five years in college, I was a bit burnt out,” admits the first-generation college graduate. After graduation, she put med school on hold and took a break.

For her planned gap year, Taylor moved to Madrid to teach English and immerse herself in the Spanish language. She enjoyed the experience so much that one year stretched to four, but her ultimate goal remained unchanged. “Spain was never about a shift in what I wanted to do. It was to supplement what I wanted to do,” she says. “It was just a different path.”

When she was ready to return to the States, she knew a post-baccalaureate pre-health program was the next step to boost her GPA while refreshing and building her course knowledge before applying to med school. At first, she didn’t think Penn’s program was an option. “I thought, ‘That’s an Ivy League school; Yeah, that’s not going to happen,’” she shares. Luckily, a friend who had completed the program and gone on to medical school encouraged Taylor to apply. When she was accepted, she knew it was the program she had to attend.

In fall 2022, Taylor enrolled as a Pre-Health Specialized Studies program student at Penn. She was able to retake biochemistry and genetics to improve her undergrad grades in those subjects, while extending her pre-med studies with more advanced classes like histology, developmental biology, infectious diseases, and specialized anatomy classes.

During her first semester, she devoted herself fully to her coursework—something she didn’t have the opportunity to do as an undergraduate. “I knew when I started my post-bacc that it was my last hope to get into med school. I had to do really, really well in this program,” she rationalized. Heading into her second semester with more confidence (and a stellar GPA), she dove into extracurriculars—essential for any strong med-school application. “I did everything extra I possibly could,” she says of seeking out opportunities outside the classroom.

Taylor worked as a teaching assistant (TA) for biochemistry lecturer Ruth Elliot and was elected to serve on the Post-Baccalaureate Society executive board. She volunteered through the Academic Associates Program, interacting with Penn’s health system’s emergency department patients who opt in to participate in research studies. “You get patient interaction, which I hadn’t had much of before, so I was nervous but excited, and it was great,” she says.

Additionally, her volunteer role with Academic Associates led to a full-time job after the program coordinator recommended Taylor for a position with Penn’s Mobile CPR Project under Dr. Benjamin Abella. She’s held the position since August 2023, helping organize free non-certification CPR trainings at requested locations in the community and working on research projects at the Center for Resuscitation Science.

The Pre-Health Programs also had a strong social component for Taylor. “I’ve made quite a few friends in the program,” she says, recalling hours of study group time at Holman Biotech Commons with pre-health classmates. Group studying—where students teach and learn from each other—wasn’t something Taylor had time to experience as an undergraduate. “That collaborative setting was a really good environment for me to learn,” she discovered. And the support network she found extended to faculty and program team members as well.

Throughout her time at Penn, Taylor worked extensively with senior advisor Danielle Lever to navigate her time at Penn and plan her next steps. She worked with Dr. Sukalpa Basu, a Pre-Health Programs instructor and advisor, to prepare for her medical school interviews. And she met with as many program advisors as she could. In addition to providing their perspectives and guidance, the advisors also write a student’s committee letter for medical school, so it’s helpful if they really know you, Taylor explains. “I was talking to the advisors quite often throughout the program, which I thought was great and very helpful. Anytime I had a question, they were always willing to meet with me,” she says, helping with course selection, providing MCAT resources, or simply letting her decompress when she was feeling anxious or stressed.

After completing the program in August 2024, Taylor spent the next few months applying to schools while working at the Mobile CPR Project. She was accepted to eight medical schools. At the end of June 2025, Taylor starts her first term as a medical student at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, where she received a full tuition scholarship. Her mentor and former boss Dr. Abella will be there to coat her at her white coat ceremony, the event that symbolically welcomes students into medical school. 

Taylor is choosing a degree in osteopathic medicine over allopathic because of its holistic approach to patient care. “In osteopathic medicine, you look at health domains like environmental factors, your income status, and your family life and home life,” she says, an approach she now knows could have benefitted her growing up. Taylor has an autoimmune disease, she shares, and she would have gotten better care herself if doctors had considered converging factors and stressors in her life, not just her presenting symptoms. Still, she says, “I'm grateful for all the challenges and obstacles I have been through to get me where I am today because I think it'll make me a better doctor. I want to be a doctor that people want to see. And I think that my life experiences will help me be that doctor.”

Moving forward, Taylor plans on taking medical Spanish as part of her studies. Influenced by her experience teaching pre-K and early elementary school children in Spain, she is currently considering a career in primary care or pediatrics. Work-life balance is also an important factor as she and her partner consider starting a family while Taylor completes her medical education and launches a career.

“They always say med school is like drinking water out of a fire hydrant,” she muses, “but I think the Penn post-bacc has helped me prepare for that. It helped me build confidence in myself. I can do this; I'm gonna be a doctor,” she says.

For incoming pre-health students, she reminds them to seek out opportunities and to ask for help when they need it. “I wouldn't be where I am today without this program and without the help of the advisors and my friends that I've made through the program,” she says. “Make the most of it and put as much effort into it as you can,” she advises. “Si, se puede; You can do it.”