MISSION AND MINISTRY | Charlotte Cheng ’20 wants to be a doctor for personal and social justice reasons. Cheng vividly remembers watching her grandmother, Mei Fong, get on plane for 14-hour flight to Taiwan just to go to a standard doctor’s appointment. Her grandmother did not have health insurance before she became a U.S. citizen, so she had a very hard time getting insurance. “I believe health care is a basic human right,” Cheng said, “because my grandmother didn’t have health insurance and because of a language barrier she could not communicate with most physicians. The U.S. has made health care access difficult for many people.”
Cheng wants to learn about her patients’ needs and desires more wholistically. She believes that knowledge will ultimately make her a better doctor. That’s why she decided to take an important step forward after graduating from LMU before starting medical school. Cheng is going to do post-graduate service at Christ House in Washington, D.C., which provides comprehensive and compassionate health care to sick, homeless men in the District of Columbia. “I want to learn how to really understand my patients, and how to teach my patients to take care of themselves. Christ House will provide me opportunity to learn how to do that,” said Cheng.
Her passion for caring for others was also fueled by her experiences at LMU. “The service of faith and the promotion of justice was really hammered into us our first year. I took that really seriously.” As a first-year student Cheng started a club on campus called Volunteers Around the World, where students joined her on international mission trips focused on medicine. She also regularly did service at the Venice Family Clinic and UCLA Medical Center.
Cheng is a political science major and chemistry minor. She wrote most of her papers in college about health and social justice issues. For example, her senior thesis, “Does Public Health Policy Matter? Explaining Variation in COVID-19 Outcomes Across the 50 States,” Cheng hoped to explain which state factors influenced Covid-19 case and death rates in order to help policy makers navigate future pandemics. In the thesis, she challenged the U.S. to pay attention to vulnerable communities to disease, which exist because of systemic health care inequity.
She also wants to be a doctor because she experienced firsthand how critical health care workers are in challenging moments. Last summer, her 13-year-old brother unexpectedly passed away from a heart condition. “All of my faith was placed into the health care professionals who were just caring for him and seeing that solidified why I want to be a physician,” said Cheng. “I want to help people who like have less access to health care, those most vulnerable in our community.”
Patrick Furlong, interim director of CSA, told Cheng about Christ House during her junior year. He believes post-graduate service is a natural next step for students after they leave the bluff. “It’s a chance for LMU graduates to take everything they have learned and apply it, and hopefully route themselves even deeper into this commitment,” said Furlong. “To do this work for and with others for their entire careers. That is what really fires me up.”
