Executive CouncilMaximilian Cruz
Hometown:
I grew up in St. Louis, MO, but my parents moved to Washington, DC, so, I guess DC now?
Undergraduate School:
University of Notre Dame (2012) – Go Irish!
Medical School:
Cooper Medical School
When did you become involved in LMSA? What encouraged you to be a part of LMSA?
I became involved with LMSA my first year of medical school. My “buy-in” to Latino culture has an interesting path because my dad is Puerto Rican, but my mom is from Germany, so my siblings and I actually spoke German before English, and never learned Spanish growing up. I learned Spanish the hard/expensive way-studying it from middle school through college, and spent half a year after college in Peru doing social and medical service work. The more time I spent around Latino culture, the more I fell in love with it (to the great pleasure of my dad and Abuela). I really loved how welcoming everyone was to me during my time in Peru, and I was amazed at how quickly you can become family with total strangers; this is an environment I wanted to continue to be a part of in medical school, which led me straight to LMSA. JC Lopez (who also serves on this board) convinced me to attend the fall regional conference my first year, and after that I was totally hooked.
What do you expect to accomplish this year in your position?
I want to make sure I keep the board on task as to the activities and assignments we need to get done. It’s easy to miss deadlines, so I want to make sure we hold ourselves accountable; myself included! I hope to have a “utility player” role–playing a hand in different projects board members are working on, helping with some of the details, so that they can focus on the main purpose of their project. I want to make sure all the projects and ideas being worked on reflect what we as an organization want to represent, and the goals we set forth. Most importantly I want to have a blast working together with all these incredible individuals!
Career goals?
I’m about to start my clinical years, so I’ll be able to give you a much better answer to this in about a year. I’m pretty certain I want to go into pediatrics, and I’ve also really enjoyed critical care, but overall I’m keeping an open mind going into my clinical years. Whatever I go into I want to practice in an environment with an underserved population. I’ve been very involved with the community in Camden my first two years, and I really enjoy identifying barriers to care that the community faces and helping to set create, or work with programs to address these barriers and minimize the healthcare access gaps so many community members face. I think it’s important to remember the power of grassroots medicine, and I certainly want to continue to be involved in that when I become a physician.
Hobbies:
I was introduced to racquetball last year and love playing it now, I also love running, watching Notre Dame football, getting pics from my mom of our dogs who have replaced me and my sisters, and beating my girlfriend in Sudoku and KenKen puzzle races–if you like Sudokus you should give KenKen a try.
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