Fredrick Ochoa dreamed of becoming a doctor in high school, but fear set in just before he began college in New York City. He wasn’t sure if the medical school path would allow him to fully experience the city. Originally from a small town between Los Angeles and San Diego, this move represented an opportunity that he hoped would change his life. Instead of pursuing the premed track, Ochoa explored new career paths, interning for numerous fashion and marketing companies throughout college, leading him to pursue a career as a publicist.
His pursuit of becoming a publicist brought him back to Los Angeles, where he ended up working as a personal assistant to one of the winners of RuPaul’s Drag Race. This gave Ochoa the opportunity to travel the world in an entirely new way. “While I had vacationed internationally previously, actually working in each of these cities was a completely different experience,” he said.
Then, as COVID-19 began to develop around the world, Ochoa’s work life was put on hold. As he reflected on his career path, he found himself returning to his dreams of becoming a doctor. “This happening concurrently with rising social unrest made my current life path feel vapid. I knew I wanted to do more to help people."
Two recent events were pivotal in Ochoa’s realization that now was the time to pursue his dream and change careers. The first, seeing the heinous treatment of medical workers and volunteers who were trying to help Black Lives Matter protestors; the second, the intense feelings that came with seeing the names of a thousand of the 100,000 people in the United States who had lost their lives to COVID-19 in the New York Times, and how this starkly contrasted their handling of the AIDS epidemic.
“In 1991, when the AIDS epidemic reached the same gruesome threshold, the New York Times wrote only a small article listing no names or humanization of those who had perished on a random page. I knew that this neglect in the media spoke to the lack of empathy those diagnosed with HIV and AIDS faced during the height of the crisis and still face today. These events reinforced the fact that underrepresented communities struggle for equal access to healthcare. At this point, I knew that not only did I want to become a doctor, but that I also wanted to work towards eliminating the disparities in healthcare faced by underprivileged communities,” he said.
