"When I look back at my third year, I want to say I gave every rotation the same opportunity to teach me about who I am."
I took more of a backseat role, and I think part of the reason why I did that was just… I'm not shy… as you can tell, but for some reason, culturally, and maybe just because of the places I've grown up, I've been more prone to hiding some things about myself and my personality and who I am. It takes a little bit for that to come out of me. I really appreciate that Sharmeen and Omar did that because by doing so I was able to get involved, and it's now a really important part of who I am. It's something we actually have talked about in one of our prayer sessions. We're kind of creating this larger Muslim community here, and it's going to give us opportunity to learn about the community around us, but maybe help others learn about who we are. I think the best way to learn from a culture or to learn from a religion or learn from a group of people is to go to the source and talk to people and build those human interactions. If you're just going to watch the news, that's where you're going to get your information from, and you, unfortunately, might not learn the most accurate things.
It's become super important to me to also reconnect with my faith, and see how that impacts my schooling and my education. I kind of see how important it was for me to do those things. I have to credit them for doing that and for pulling me in, and also to Dr. Arafat. The first three days of medical school, I'm walking around campus and I see an older woman wearing a hijab. I was like, this is a person I want to get to know, and she has been unbelievable to my education, showing me that I can proudly display who I am, and at the same time, be a really good physician, and a really good role model, and a really good teacher. I really look up to people who are unapologetically themselves, and it helps pull other people out to be unapologetically themselves. I want to do that, which is part of the reason I want to go to Paterson, so they see an older, Muslim Arab student whose parents
were refugees, who has been through a lot of issues with my culture and connecting to who I am and going through those pathways. Maybe they can see that they could do it, too. So that's what Dr. Arafat did for me. Not to say that if Dr. Arafat wasn't here, I may not have found that journey in some other way, but seeing Dr. Arafat has definitely solidified the process really early on for me. I can't appreciate her enough. All the other Muslim students and all my classmates in general are very accepting and they want to learn more and are not afraid to ask questions.
L-R: Omar Shawaf, COM '21, Sharmeen Jaffrey, COM '21, and Hwyda Arafat, MD, PhD, MSc MEdL at the Interfaith Discussion co-sponsored by the MSA