Matthew Babayev
The bankruptcy papers sat on our kitchen table for three days before my parents finally told us. I was 15, practicing Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor in the living room, a piece about longing and loss that suddenly felt too real. My mother stood in the doorway, her face carrying the weight of what she was about to say.
Matthew Babayev
“We need you to understand something,” she began in Russian, the language we used for serious conversations. “The music lessons . . . they might have to stop.”
In our Bukharian Jewish household, those words meant more than losing piano lessons. They meant my parents, who had fled the former Soviet Union with nothing but hope, were watching their American dream crumble. My father, once a respected watchmaker in Dushanbe, now worked as a cab driver whose wages barely covered rent. My mother, who was fortunate enough to get an education, balanced nursing with raising four children. And here I was, their eldest, playing classical music while our world fell apart.
I kept playing that night, but something shifted. Each note became an act of defiance against our circumstances. If my parents could sacrifice everything for us, I could transform their sacrifice into something meaningful. The piano bench became my refuge and my laboratory, a place where discipline met determination.
Three months later, I was sitting at a different kind of bench, in Columbia's microbiology lab at 6am, pipetting measles antibodies for a research project I’d convinced a professor to let me join. I had left home at 4:30am, taking three trains because we had lost our car in the bankruptcy. My fingers, trained by years of scales and arpeggios, found unexpected purpose in the precise movements required for serial dilutions. When my professor asked why a high school student would commit to such hours, I couldn’t explain that this lab represented more than research. It was my family’s path to stability.
The moment that changed everything came during a shadowing experience in an operating room at Mount Sinai. I was shadowing an otorhinolaryngologist performing a tonsillectomy on a 7-year-old boy whose family reminded me of my own—immigrant parents speaking broken English, worried about bills, clutching worn insurance cards. As the surgeon cauterized the enlarged tonsils, each movement was deliberate and exact. He called it “a kind of dance,” and indeed, it reminded me of the balance and grace I had practiced at the piano. But here the stakes were not aesthetic; they were life itself. The patient’s ability to breathe comfortably again depended on the surgeon’s steadiness.
After surgery, I watched that child wake up, breathing freely for the first time in months, his mother crying with relief. At that moment, I understood that medicine wasn’t just about precision. It was about access, dignity, and serving those whom the system often forgets.
That is why I chose the Sophie Davis BS/MD program at the CUNY School of Medicine, knowing it would mean seven years of public school tuition instead of private medical school debt that could cripple my family further. But more than the financial relief, I chose Sophie Davis because of its mission: to train physicians who will serve New York’s underserved communities. This wasn’t just words on a website. It was my family’s story, my community’s need, and my purpose crystallized into an institutional promise.
My classmates didn’t understand why I worked 20 hours a week teaching piano while maintaining a 3.9 GPA. They didn’t see my youngest brother’s college fund growing from those lessons or my parents finally sleeping through the night without worry. But my professors did. They saw a student who understood viscerally why our mission mattered.
This understanding deepened during my obstetrics research rotation, where I studied virtual reality as a cost-effective alternative to epidurals for pain management during ultrasound-guided needle procedures. The women in our study weren’t abstractions in a dataset—they were versions of my mother, immigrants who navigated a healthcare system that often felt designed to exclude them. I remember one participant from Russia, gripping my hand as the pain intensified during chorionic villus sampling. As I guided her through the VR breathing exercises, speaking to her in Russian, she whispered “spasiba”—thank you—the same way my mother had thanked doctors who spoke her language during her pregnancies.
This wasn’t just research; it was Sophie Davis’s mission, a mission that I wanted to emulate. Every data point represented a mother who deserved dignity in her most vulnerable moments. Every successful pain reduction score meant one less family forced to choose between medical comfort and financial survival.
I recently presented our findings at the Annual Sophie Davis Research Day. The project, “Virtual Reality as a Cost-Effective Pain Management Alternative in Underserved Populations,” won the second-place award. But standing at that podium, I saw my father in the front row, his phone raised to record every word for our relatives. The man who once hid bankruptcy papers from his children now watched his son pursuing valuable research, using education to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor and becoming financially secure.
“You see?” he whispered to my mother in Russian during the applause. “The music lessons were worth it.”
But he’s wrong about one thing. It wasn’t the lessons that mattered. It was learning that precision without purpose is just performance. Sophie Davis taught me to channel the discipline I learned at the piano bench into research that serves and into care that is compassionate. Every patient I’ll serve, every family I’ll comfort, every barrier I’ll help break down—these are the notes that will compose my life’s work.
The bankruptcy that once threatened to silence our dreams became the very thing that prepared me for Sophie Davis’s mission. It taught me that medicine isn’t just about healing bodies but about healing the less fortunate, and doing so in a financially responsible way. This scholarship isn’t just financial support. It is validation that students like me, whose families have seen dreams deferred by economic reality, belong in medicine. With your help, I won’t just become another physician. I’ll become proof that financial hardship can forge the very compassion and determination that our healthcare system desperately needs, especially for those it has historically left behind.
My fingers still remember Chopin, but now they’re learning a different art—one deeply intertwined with human life, namely, the art of medicine.