Student’s passion found in a Pennsylvania doctor’s office

Mary Koroma discovered her passion and started her path to a graduate degree in public health from Central Michigan University sitting in a Pennsylvania doctor’s office.

She was there to get clinical experience in American health care. She’d earned her medical degree in China but wanted to expand her experience to bolster her future career aspirations.

The doctor asked her patient, who’d come to discuss symptoms she was having, what year her house was built and whether it had a basement.

Preventative care is not widespread in Sierra Leone, where Koroma grew up, and she only treated symptomatic patients as a medical professional in China. She asked the doctor about the seemingly unrelated questions.

The doctor suggested she pursue a Master of Public Health and recommended the school she’d earned hers from … CMU. Koroma is preparing to graduate with hers in May.

Koroma plans to find a career bridging public health and medicine, where she uses research to identify gaps in health care and find ways to use medicine to treat them before the onset of disease.

In fact, she’s started doing that by publishing research.

Last year, for example, she was part of a team that researched the rate of colorectal cancer screenings in Americans between the years 2018-2024. Their research showed that only one third of Americans over 45 were up to date on their screenings.

Socio-economic factors like access to health insurance and the cost of screenings play a big role. People who have access to health insurance saw rates of screenings increase. People who would have to pay out-of-pocket costs saw lower rates of screenings.

People who live in rural places got screenings at a lower rate than people who lived in cities where health care facilities are concentrated. Immigrants saw lower rates of screenings, too.

“It’s not just about age, but also a lot about factors like access,” she said. People who don’t get screened, don’t get treatment in the early stages of disease. They wind up finding out they are sick when symptoms start to show. By that time, the situation is much more serious.

“People are dying,” she said.

Koroma’s motivation to help people came to her while growing up in Sierra Leone. The country saw a massive outbreak of Ebola in 2014, and she watched her father—a medical doctor—leave home every day to treat people.

It was like having a family member in the military leave during wartime, she said. She didn’t know if he’d ever come home. The country is still dealing with the outbreak’s fallout, including lingering health problems among disease survivors.

After graduating from high school, she traveled to China to study medicine at a university that her father attended for advanced medical training. She was there in 2020, when COVID-19 swept the world.

“It was a traumatic experience … for the second time,” she said. She’d spent time in isolation during the Ebola outbreak and again spent time in isolation while living in China.

She came to the United States looking for the experience of working in a new health care system. After graduation, she hopes to work in public health in the U.S. to gain more experience to continue her work addressing gaps in cancer prevention and detection.

Her time at CMU has helped her bring together her experiences with two pandemics on two continents and develop a conviction that prevention can save lives, she said.

“I’ve learned a lot from my mentors, my professors and also from my colleagues,” she said. “CMU has given me a strong foundation.”