In this episode of Our Voices, Our Future, host Rhea Manohar sits down with Jacqueline “Jackie” Hidalgo, a third-year medical student at St. George’s University and member of the Gender Equity Task Force within the American Medical Women’s Association. Born and raised in Long Island, New York, and a graduate of New York University with a degree in Psychology, Jackie shares her deeply personal journey through medicine, one marked not by perfection, but by perseverance.

During this episode we talk about what it feels like to be told to quit by a professor, the subtle and overt misogyny that can shape a student’s confidence, and how imposter syndrome can blur with internalized bias. Jackie opens up about academic setbacks, repeating a term, and the internal dialogue that followed, challenging medicine’s culture of perfection and redef ...