Scholarship Points Student Home to Rural Care

The colorful quilt in Brooke Bishop’s childhood living room is a hodgepodge of T-shirt swaths artfully stitched together. 

It’s perfectly unique and a little quirky and warm like a bear hug, just like the man who once wore the shirts and in whose honor it was made. 

Brooke Bishop, a second-year medical student at the VCU School of Medicine, recalled how her grandfather, Marvin Lewis Bishop Sr., loved college sports, even though he never attended college. 

Not only are you changing a student’s life, you’re also changing their whole family’s life.

Brooke Bishop, VCU School of Medicine, Class of 2027

Papa, as she called him, was the oldest of 12 children and grew up during an era when missing months of school to help around the family farm was simply a necessity.

Though his own education was cut short, he made sure to protect those opportunities for the next generation in his family. He set money aside for each of his grandchildren’s college education, a quiet act of love that allowed Bishop to attend the University of Virginia for her bachelor’s degree. 

She made him proud, though he wouldn’t see her graduate. 

Mr. Bishop died during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Bishop was a sophomore. 

Looking back, Bishop can’t help but wonder if better access to health resources in their rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia, community might have given them more time.  

That maybe — had health care and access to providers been more available — the owner of that vast T-shirt collection would still be cheering on his beloved granddaughter. 

Living a Dream

Bishop is the recipient of the Drs. Julie C. Møller and John B. Sanford Endowed Scholarship along with the Burke Family Scholarship and R. Randolph Duffer, M.D., Family Practice Scholarship. 

She remembers the day she learned she would be awarded the scholarships. She and a roommate were preparing to move to Richmond to start medical school. Apartment hunting wasn’t going well. 

Then she checked her email. 

“I cried and I stopped talking for two minutes and I called my mom,” Bishop said. “It was truly life-changing — instantaneously, a million pounds were lifted off my shoulders.” 

Financial strain is seldom limited to students, Bishop explained.

“I promise you that the student who receives a scholarship has a family behind them that is not showing it but is just as scared as the student is about how they’re going to make it work,” she said about students paying for medical school. “My family couldn’t help me financially and my mom wasn’t going to show it, but I know she was stressing day and night about me having to take out that much money in student loans.”

Philanthropy launches students like Bishop into careers that allow them to return to their communities and create real change. 

She admitted that she started medical school with a sense of having to pursue whatever area of medicine would help her pay off her loans. 

Now, she said — supported by scholarships — the reality of going back to Dinwiddie and opening a general family practice, a vital need in that community, is within reach.  

“I’ll be the first doctor in my family. My grandmother has already told the whole town — everybody knows,” Bishop said grinning. She relishes her small-town roots. She saw her grandparents every day as a child. Health care, however, wasn’t a priority.

“I didn’t go to the doctor yearly, and I never noticed my parents going to the doctor,” she said. “My grandparents would put up with a lot of health issues and just say they had a cold, but a lot of times it was worse and it would take a trip to the ER to figure that out.” 

COVID-19 opened her eyes to the harsh reality of her hometown’s limited access to medical care. When her grandfather got sick, he didn’t immediately seek care. By the time he did, it was likely too late. 

“Something just switched in me, and I realized that if there were more providers in the county — not that it wouldn’t have happened — but a lot of health issues my grandfather had for a very long time could have been addressed much earlier.”

Bishop wants others to have more options than her family did. 

She wants to be that option.

“Dream scenario — I would love to own a practice in Dinwiddie,” she said. “Living out here, close to my family and having my own practice where I could help the people I went to school with, or I know their grandparents because they were best friends with my grandparents, that’s where I feel I can give back.”

She added: “That’s something that would have been impossible without the generosity of donors.” 

Scholarships create a ripple effect.

“Not only are you changing a student’s life, you’re also changing their whole family’s life,” Bishop said about donors. And the impact doesn’t end there. “Thousands of people will feel the impact of that scholarship so you’re bettering lives for years to come,” she added. 

Bishop also said having less financial burden following medical school puts her in a position to do the same for a student in the future.

“Going through it and not having the stress of financial burden on top of the rigors of medical school, it’s definitely one of the best investments you could make,” Bishop said. “I hope one day that I can help out a student in a similar situation.”

If you would like to make a gift to support the School of Medicine, please contact Niles Eggleston, assistant vice president for development for VCU Health and the VCU School of Medicine, by calling 804- 828-2112 or emailing niles.eggleston@vcuhealth.org.