It's not often that a high school brawl with gang members sets you down a path to becoming a Harvard-trained doctor. But that's exactly how Alister Martin's life unfolded.
Alister Martin, MD, had initially planned to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps, managing the drug store in Neptune, NJ, township where he was raised. But a fight changed his prospects.
When his mother rushed to the hospital, he was so bruised and bloody that she couldn’t recognize him at first. Ever since he was a baby, she had done her best to shield him from the neighborhood where gang violence was a regular disruption. But it hadn’t worked. Martin had loved tennis since middle school, when his eighth-grade math teacher, Billie Weise, also a tennis pro, got him a job as a court sweeper at an upscale tennis club nearby. He knew nothing then about tennis but would come to fall in love with the sport. To get her son out of town, Martin’s mother took out loans for $30,000 and sent him to a Florida tennis training camp.
And Martin displayed other attributes that would draw others to him – and later prove important in his career as a doctor. His ability to display empathy and interact with students and teachers separated him from his peers, Khan says. “There’re a lot of really smart students out there,” he says, “but not many who understand people like Martin.”
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