Making medical school dreams a reality: Fernando Flores Leon’s Minorities in Medicine journey

Pictured: Fernando Flores Leon and Dr. Juan Magaña

Five of them — mom, dad, two sisters, and little Fernando Flores Leon — maneuvered around the washer and dryer, found crevices and small surfaces for their belongings, and called the laundry room their home. Grateful to this day that the gas dryer did not have a leak. Because, finally, in late 1997, they had made it from Mexico to the United States.

They would stay in that tiny space in that Oakland house for a year before moving to a garage in Watsonville. Cement floors. Wind whistling beneath the door. No heat. “But we did have the basics — stove, fridge, sink,” says Flores Leon, now 28 and in his first year of medical school at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota after becoming a Montage Health Foundation Minorities in Medicine program scholar in 2022. But we’ll get to that.

When Flores Leon turned 6 years old, things started to shift. “We moved to a manufactured home in Prunedale and finally had a place that was ours,” he says.

Flores Leon thrived. He got straight As through elementary and middle school. “My mom let us know that school was a way out of all of this.” And he started to dream.

“My mom would read me a book called The Magic School Bus Wet All Over: A Book about the Water Cycle,” he says. “It was about the water cycle — condensation, evaporation, precipitation. That helped me get interested in the world around us, and I started to form a scientific mind.”

Then high school hit. Flores Leon slacked off, spending his time working a part-time job at McDonald’s that he held his junior and senior year. Homework didn’t get done. Grades dipped.

“I was still a good student, but not like elementary and middle school,” Flores Leon says. “I remember sitting at my high school graduation and all the kids who did best were sitting in the front rows. I was sitting near the back of the stands. I remember thinking, ‘I could be sitting there, but I didn’t put in the work or time to become a top student.’ I was disappointed for not having pushed myself to achieve more.”

It would not happen again.

He was accepted to the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he focused on biochemistry and molecular biology, and graduated with honors despite a daily hours-long commute and working various jobs.

In his science courses at UCSC, he was surrounded by people who wanted to be doctors. He wondered why. So, channeling the same curiosity he had for The Magic School Bus water cycle, Flores Leon went to see his family doctor and asked if he could shadow him for a week. Request granted.

“I liked the work, and I thought he was doing great things for the community,” Flores Leon says of Watsonville family doctor Robert Letamendi, who has been practicing for nearly four decades.

To continue learning about medicine, Flores Leon began volunteering in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. It was there that he had a serendipitous encounter two years ago.

“I was sitting down, and here comes Dr. [Juan] Magaña,” Flores Leon says. “He sits down next to me. I looked over and thought, ‘This guy looks like me. I should strike up a conversation.’”

But before he could say a word, Magaña struck up a conversation first. He asked Flores Leon what brought him to volunteer in the hospital. “I’m here to explore medicine,” Flores Leon said.

Magaña shared his email address and then-Twitter handle, and asked Flores Leon to send him a message. There might be a program for him — Minorities in Medicine.

Minorities in Medicine, a Montage Health Foundation program, provides underrepresented and low-income aspiring medical professionals in Monterey County with mentorship, financial support, and hands-on clinical experience to assist in the complex process of applying to healthcare programs like medical school.

Flores Leon applied and was accepted to the 2022 Minorities in Medicine group. There, he gained 134 hours of clinical shadowing experience with Community Hospital doctors, plus mentorship, support, and letters of recommendation for his 28 medical school applications.

Today, Flores Leon is a medical school student at the prestigious Mayo Clinic.

To help support his medical studies, Flores Leon was awarded a $7,500 scholarship from Montage Health Foundation. “The money is not only helping financially; emotionally it has been helpful, too. It represents support from my community. So, I’m not in Minnesota alone.”

Magaña hopes that someday Flores Leon will return.

“He is one of the most mature, motivated people I know,” Magaña says. “He has overcome tremendous adversity, and he has a lens to see the world with compassion. Our community would be very fortunate if Fernando came back to work with Montage Health.”

“Coming back?” Flores Leon says. “If all doors are open, and I can pick anywhere to work, I will pick Montage Health. And it would be great to work with Dr. Magaña as part of Minorities in Medicine.”

Learn more about how Montage Health Foundation supports the community.