Turning Hardship Into Opportunity
Sonam Dolma’s journey to medical school began in Bir Tibetan Colony, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Northern India, where she was born in 1997. Her father, Gyurmey Namgyal, and his brother had fled there on foot from Eastern Tibet to escape the Chinese Communist regime.
Dolma spent the first decade of her life in Bir and attended Tibetan Children’s Village, a boarding school two-and-a-half hours away in Dharamsala, India. That school had been established in 1960 by the Dalai Lama and his sister, originally as a nursery school for orphaned children.
In 2009, Dolma, her sister and their father relocated to Madison, Wisconsin as part of the U.S.-Tibetan Resettlement Project. Passed in 1990, the immigration bill allowed 1,000 Tibetans selected by lottery to come to the United States at their own expense and on the condition of pre-arranged employment. Madison was one of 21 cluster sites around the country and is home to more than 600 Tibetans today.
Dolma found the change overwhelming.
“I didn’t really know what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation nor why I had been uprooted. I have vivid memories of being an English-as-a-second-language learner and not knowing where I fit in.”
Dolma and her sister became translators for their father at parent-teacher conferences and doctor’s appointments — a grown-up task for the young girls.
“The initial years were difficult, and it felt unfair. I was hurt and bitter that I wasn’t near my mom and was in this foreign land,” Dolma reflects, adding that her mom is still in Bir.
A trip to India during her sophomore year of high school — when Dolma volunteered to teach English to young Buddhist monks — changed her outlook. Some of the monks, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years old, became part of the monastery to have access to food and education because their families lacked the resources to care for them.
“The little monks were so excited and happy to learn, and their enthusiasm opened my eyes. I thought, ‘Wow, I am taking everything for granted. I live in the United States, and I have had this awesome learning opportunity that many kids do not have. It helped me see a new reality — that my parents had sacrificed their dreams so I could actualize mine.”
With that shift in perspective, Dolma began to harness her experience as a strength rather than a weakness. And with memories of her life in India, she soon realized medicine was her desired career path.
“I remember returning home from school one day to a strange stillness as my parents wept. My grandfather had passed away from an unknown lung condition with persistent fever and bloody coughs. We now know it was tuberculosis (TB),” she shares.
Dolma says that illnesses and premature deaths were common in Bir because the sole clinic had only one Tibetan physician to provide care for the entire refugee settlement.
“The nearest hospital was two hours away,” she says. “Witnessing the affliction of my family and community members with manageable diseases like TB ignited my desire to eliminate and prevent such diseases in underserved communities.”
She admired the volunteer physicians from the United States who provided aid in Bir, and was intrigued by their knowledge of the human body.
“Despite language barriers, I recall the physicians’ humanistic care and respect for our culture and autonomy while they worked to improve the health of our refugee settlement,” she says.
While Dolma was volunteering at a medical clinic in Bir in 2017, she truly understood the impact she could have.
“I was surprised to see my mother’s friend Kunsang. This vivacious lady who owned the local vegetable stall now looked timid and defeated, unable to convey her symptoms to the volunteer doctors. Because I speak Tibetan, Hindi, and English, I understood the nuances of her language and translated for her and the American doctors,” she shares. “The look of relief on Kunsang’s face filled me with a sense of purpose.”
With her sights set on medical school, Dolma earned a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry with honors from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2020. Before that, as an undergraduate, she completed several pre-medical internships with the Summer Health Professions Education Program in California and the Summer Medical Leadership Program at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
Dolma was accepted to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and elected by her peers to be a co-president of the Class of 2025. This was a dream come true for Dolma and for her father, who is a nursing assistant and has worked for UW Health for more than 15 years.
“Even when I was in high school, my father would always say, ‘I wonder when I’m going to see you walking down the halls of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health in your white coat,’” she recalls.
Tears flow easily as Dolma describes how her father worked two and three jobs so that she and her sister would not have to worry about how to finance their education.
“My dad always said, ‘I’ll do my part and you guys do your part, which is being good humans — first and foremost— and then focusing on your education and using it to help other people.’ So, everything that he was praying for came true, and it’s very special for me to see my dad that happy,” says Dolma.
She is passionate about the Wisconsin Idea and feels that an internal medicine practice will allow her to give back to the Tibetan community and to residents of Wisconsin.
In July 2023, at the invitation of the prime minister of the Central Tibetan Administration Office, Dolma participated in a four-day conference in India that brought together Tibetan youth leaders who had been living in exile all around the world, and they were able to discuss the future of Tibet and how to preserve its culture and language.
More than just preserving her culture, Dolma appreciates sharing it.
“I love how intertwined my culture is with Tibetan Buddhism,” she says. “It’s the perfect amalgamation of culture and religion, and these days, more and more studies are coming out in support of mindfulness and compassion practices.”
Dolma is grateful for the way her mentor — Richard Davidson, PhD, founding director of the UW Center for Healthy Minds and professor of psychology and psychiatry at UW–Madison — elevates mindfulness and compassion as keys to well-being.
“It’s something we can all incorporate into our daily lives, no matter where we come from or what language we speak,” observes Dolma.
Noting that compassion is the guiding principle in her life, she says, “UW Health physicians personify compassion.”
She has seen this compassion modeled in the ways they have treated her father at work and how they have embraced her family. And it’s something she feels as a medical student and envisions in her career as a physician.
Dolma concludes, “Despite language and cultural barriers, the uniting factor is that we are all human. That someone from another country can see when a person is suffering and, through human compassion, can decide to help them, this surpasses cultural differences and goes beyond language barriers.”