Destinee Cooper's Biography
Excerpted from Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope

Destinee Cooper’s words are measured and delivered with a quiet certitude. “A lot of people tell me I’m blunt,” she says, but there is nothing thoughtless or curt in her candor – she simply calls life as she sees it. And she has seen a lot of it. On the streets of her neighborhood, a drive-by shooting marked virtually every weekend. At home, drugs and alcohol mired her family in violence. But as she grew, Destinee began to discover the gifts that were going to provide her with a different kind of life: her strong intellect and unflagging determination....

Though today she is the picture of health, Destinee was in and out of the hospital as a child. “The first time I remember going to the hospital was in the second grade, after someone hit me with a soccer ball. I fainted. I was all bloody, so my mother took me in. I had a concussion but I was okay. My father was always getting sick, too. He was an alcoholic and a hypochondriac. I became a hypochondriac, too. Every time we got sick, we went into the emergency room.”

Destinee believes the seeds of her interest in science were sown during those numerous trips to the hospital, though it wasn’t until sixth grade that she really began to think seriously about how she would actually become a doctor.

She began volunteering at a convalescent home. She would play Go Fish and Crazy Eights with the home’s elderly residents, sit and listen to the stories, help people walk and make sure they took their medicine.... Though she was only 11, Destinee was beginning to get a sense of what it meant to be a medical caretaker, as she dealt with people losing their memories, people who were incontinent, people who were depressed....

In her freshman year of high school, she started volunteering at the local hospital as a candy striper. There, she did errands for the nurses: took specimens to the lab, transported patients in the hospital, helped take care of babies in the ICU and observed in the ER. She loved the people she worked with at the hospital – a big, healthy de facto family of people who all worked together and ate dinner together every night, with much laughter and joking. “Working at the hospital, I became even more enthusiastic and focused about being a doctor,” she recalls.

Destinee heard about SMYSP from one of her biology teachers. She was busy – volunteering, keeping up her grades and working at McDonalds 20 hours a week. She quickly filled out the application and sent it in.

Unlike many SMYSP students, Destinee already had many years of experience volunteering in a hospital when she arrived at the program. Still, she found much that was new and fascinating. “We got to work on cadavers, which was awesome,” she says. “At the hospital, I was in the therapy department. And at one point, I got to talk to an ER physician. And being there and talking to him, I thought, ‘Yeah, this fits me.’ I think if you work in an ER, you have to be positive and energetic.

“The most important part of SMYSP, for me, was getting to know everyone in the house. We had such a good time there: we had water fights, played practical jokes on each other. My group project was on all of the different medicines that have been found in the rain forest and the need to preserve the rain forest for future research. On the last day, when we did our presentation and graduated, I locked arms with two of my friends and cried.... It was so fantastic, because being at SMYSP broke down a lot of the emotional barriers I had put up in the sixth grade. I realized how many helpful, good people are out there for me.

To learn more about Destinee Cooper’s experience in SMYSP and to find out what she is doing today, purchase the book Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope at the Stanford Health Promotion Resource Center. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to funding scholarships for SMYSP graduates. You can also purchase this book at Amazon.com.