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From California to Carolina, Adam wants to give every community the health care they deserve.
Incoming first-year Adam Sherif spent his high school years creating a community for his fellow students and making health care more accessible for residents in his hometown of Sacramento, California.
Now, he’s looking forward to bringing that work to Carolina.
There’s a strong emphasis on community service at Carolina, and you can see how the students are creating real changes in their community and around the world. I don’t want to come to school just to study and get good grades. I want to make a difference while I’m doing it.
Sherif’s drive to serve began at his private Catholic school, where he felt disconnected from his culture as an Egyptian and Muslim. He says joining the Black Student Union was the turning point when he began to think about service and belonging.
“I joined the Black Student Union during my sophomore year, and I started reading and noticing the hardships we were experiencing as a community,” Sherif says.
That led him to found the Arab/Muslim Student Union to further serve students in his school who felt they didn’t fit into other communities.
“It can be hard to feel like the odd man out, so having a group to identify with was important to me,” says Sherif, who served as the organization’s president. “We also used the unions as a space to talk about different perspectives and hear from each other.”
When the pandemic began during Sherif’s sophomore year, he started searching for an opportunity to extend his service beyond his high school to help the Bay Area community. His mission was motivated by his father, an emergency room physician, who was on the front line of the response.
“My father would come home from the ER and have stories of the suffering observed before vaccines were available,” Sherif says. “The pandemic put a pause on a lot of our high school activities, but I started asking around about how I could contribute.”
His high school organized a vaccine clinic, and despite its success, Sherif felt they weren’t reaching those who truly needed assistance.
“Although the vaccine clinic at my school was successful, I looked at the line of cars and saw people driving Mercedes and Teslas, and I realized to really make a difference, I needed to go into the community,” Sherif says.
Working alongside school board member Dr. Kawanaa Carter, Sherif helped organize another vaccine clinic, this time focused on underserved populations in his area. He directed traffic in the pop-up drive-thru clinics, handed out paperwork, input data, filled out vaccine cards and recruited his classmates to join in the effort. The clinic vaccinated almost 30,000 people in eight months and held clinics in public spaces within the community to ensure accessibility.
Volunteering with the clinic solidified Sherif’s interest in health care, and he chose to attend Carolina to pursue a career in public health.
I want to study health disparities and how we can address them. COVID was a reality check for most of us that these communities have been hurting for so long, and it was only amplified during the pandemic.
The University’s focus on service appealed to Sherif, who wants to continue to contribute to ending health inequality. Carolina also stood out to Sherif because his father has been a fan of the University since he immigrated to the United States after attending medical school in Egypt.
“My father went to a seminar in Chapel Hill while he was a resident, and he absolutely loved the school, and especially the basketball team,” Sherif says.
Although he’ll have to wait a few months to attend his first basketball game as a student, Sherif is looking forward to his first day on campus and meeting his roommate, an international student from Nepal.
“I’ve never lived anywhere except California, so I’m looking forward to coming to Chapel Hill and working, living and studying beside my classmates from all over the world and learning from them,” Sherif says.
Story courtesy of UNC.edu.
“We have so many values-driven people, businesses, and organizations in Chapel Hill. If I have to choose one, I recently experienced B3 Coffee, a nonprofit mobile coffee shop that provides work opportunities for people of all abilities. Students can enjoy amazing coffee served with thoughtfulness and friendliness, or if they want a deeper engagement, they can volunteer to support the business.”
“There is no better place than the Chapel Hill Public Library. When you sit in their main reading room, it’s like being in the forest or on the porch of a great mountain lodge! And then when you need a break, you can wander downstairs to their bookstore and find a used book you didn’t even realize until that minute you desperately needed!”
“I’m a big nature lover so it’s either running or hiking or kayaking at Jordan Lake. This is my medication. This is where I design my class and design the new curriculum – it’s in the kayak.”
“I recommend enjoying relaxing dinners at one of the many awesome and student-friendly restaurants along Franklin Street. Most of them offer outdoor seating. A favorite for me is Mediterranean Deli as it offers many vegetarian options.”
“I recommend Bhangra Elite, the National Pan-Hellenic Council’s Homecoming Step Show, and UNC Kamikazi, a hip-hop group. They offer high-energy, highly entertaining performances with the added bonus of allowing you to sample some of the best of other cultures!”
Shristi Sharma has been teaching herself computer programming since fourth grade. She eventually learned so much that she was able to design an app that could help predict Alzheimer’s Disease through a smart watch.
Now, she’s coming to Carolina to take what she learned on her own to the next level.
“I was just doing it as a hobby for all these years,” she says. “It has all been independent. This is my first time to get formal training in something I’m really passionate about.”
As she hones her computer science skills to address health issues impacting millions of Americans, she hopes to make a difference on campus and beyond.
Learn more about Sharma’s goals at Carolina.
I plan on studying computer science, but more specifically, I want to do research in computer science. I think that it’s more than a major, it’s a skill. It’s super interdisciplinary, so you can use it with any subject you want. For me, those subjects recently have become health, neuroscience and psychology. It’s brains, minds and computers. That’s the intersection I want to work at.
The reason this interest came up is because three years ago, a really close family friend died due to Alzheimer’s, and I was trying to find what I could do to help such a big problem. There was this moment of insight when I was going through a magazine, and on one page, I read this article about living with Alzheimer’s and how hard it is, and on the right side was an ad for the latest FitBit. The two images converged in my mind. I thought, “What if you could predict Alzheimer’s with a smart watch?” That’s one of the main research interests I hope I can continue at Carolina.
One thing that I’ve seen a lot about being a Tar Heel is just how dedicated all the students are to community service and social engagement. It’s so high at Carolina, and I really love that.
I think that’s what it means to be a Tar Heel: to be completely invested in your community.
My passion for research. I’ll have some great opportunities to work with professors here and hopefully be able to contribute to the community that way. I’m also from a very, very small school. I had nine kids in my graduating class, but they were from six different countries. It was a really tight-knit group of students, and I learned a lot about diversity and how to be empathetic and listen to people. I’m hoping that I can bring that to UNC as I expand my world family.
It’s an exceptional opportunity to be a part of three communities: UNC, Duke and the Roberston is itself a little community. Having that and all the simulating experiences will help me become a better leader myself. But also, as a Robertson, I’ll be connecting with so many other student leaders and the opportunity to learn to lead alongside other leaders, I think, will be a big one for me.
Story courtesy of UNC.edu.
That’s what Gabrielle found when she met Victoria, who first served as her college adviser in high school and then as her mentor when they both came to Carolina.
We quizzed these friends to see how well they truly know each other and to learn their favorite thing about Carolina.