A Great Second Start

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A Great Second Start

“I loved it, and it introduced me to a world of the scientific community that I never thought I’d be a part of. It was just an amazing opportunity, something that I never thought I would find at Utica College or anywhere."

Painting houses isn't for everyone. That's what Dr. Julio DeJesus '13 discovered after graduating from Thomas R. Proctor High School in Utica in 2003, when he decided to start his own painting business in North Carolina.

“I had some friends down there. One was starting a church and needed some help, so I went to help him out and got into the painting business. But I really didn’t like it. That was the main reason I went back to school; after a couple of years, I decided it was time for a change,” he says.

Change is a mild word for the journey that took him from painting houses to studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 2018. He is currently an Emergency Medicine Specialist.

He knew when he started applying to colleges that he wanted to be a doctor. There was a problem, though. “I didn’t love science. That was kind of a roadblock,” he says.

That roadblock was removed when he came to Utica College. Now he can't get enough of science, a dramatic reversal he attributes largely to Utica College's biology faculty, who from his very first day – and even before that – went out of their way to support his ambition.

“The summer before I started at UC, I scheduled a meeting with Dr. (Bryant) Buchanan because I wasn’t sure of what I was getting myself into. I just wanted to get a feel for what the college would be like. We ended up having a three-hour conversation. He was giving me advice and we talked back and forth. He’s just a great person to talk to,” DeJesus says.

Buchanan became his advisor, and he soon found himself developing a passion for research. In the summer of his sophomore year at UC, DeJesus was tapped for a paid internship at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, doing research on Huntington’s Disease.

“I worked with a couple of researchers who were working with an intrabody they had created that would bind to the mutant Huntington protein and prevent it from aggregating,” he explains. He continued his work on the project after his return to UC that fall.

“I loved it, and it introduced me to a world of the scientific community that I never thought I’d be a part of. It was just an amazing opportunity, something that I never thought I would find at Utica College or anywhere,” says DeJesus.

His research proved a valuable asset as he was making his case for admission to several top-tier medical schools. So did his experience as a presenter. “Presenting your findings is a huge part of science. We have presented in almost every class I’ve ever been in here, beginning as freshmen. I was really nervous about it at first, but now it seems like second nature,” he says.

DeJesus says the biology faculty do an amazing job preparing their students for what they can expect to face in medical school or graduate-level research. He didn’t fully appreciate the degree to which this is unusual until he went down Johns Hopkins for a second look.

“I was talking to some of the other applicants about my experiences at UC, and they were looking at me in disbelief. I had assumed that you could find the same thing at all these other schools. It was pretty cool to discover that what I had was something unique,” says DeJesus.

He knew how fierce the competition would be to get into a first-rate medical school. In the end, though, he gained acceptance not only to Johns Hopkins, but the University of Michigan, the University of Connecticut, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester, and Wake Forest as well. He was so impressed with Johns Hopkins, it wasn’t a difficult choice for him.

“I never thought I’d get into one of the best medical schools there is, but it was an amazing surprise that I did,” he says.