A Bronx Science student built a pre-med pipeline for his own classmates
Rayhan Mehal's Youth Medical Association offers CPR classes, webinars and hospital partnerships, free to high schoolers.
Getting into medicine usually starts with who you know. Rayhan Mehal decided to make that less true.
Mehal created the Youth Medical Association in the summer of 2022, as a student at the Bronx High School of Science. It is a nonprofit built to help high school students interested in medicine, and it is run by high schoolers, according to The Science Survey, the school paper.
The menu is wide. YMA offers premedical lessons, weekly webinars, simplified MCAT topics, shadowing sessions, volunteer opportunities and internship hours. It teaches free CPR lessons. It also runs donation drives and fundraisers, including a bake sale in November 2023, and added a Department of Career Development in January 2024 for paths beyond medicine, such as engineering, law and computer science.
The partner list is the real flex. The Science Survey reports ties with FDNY, NYU Langone Health, the NYC Mayor’s Office, SUNY College of Optometry, Columbia University, NYU’s Center for Brain Imaging, Einstein Hospital, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.
It has also spread. Chapters exist at Stuyvesant High School, Townsend Harris High School and Orange County School of the Arts in California, with others in New Jersey, North Carolina, India and Pakistan. The article says the weekly webinars reach “hundreds of students” and gives no membership total, so we will not guess one.
“The Youth Medical Association hosts weekly webinars, providing accessible education to hundreds of students,” Mehal told the paper. He added: “I hope to turn YMA into an even larger organization in the future.”
The idea is not charity in the narrow sense. It is access: the shadowing slot, the research contact and the CPR certificate that tend to go to students who already have a relative in a hospital. YMA hands them out to anyone who signs up. The organization’s website now points visitors to an updated site at ymaintl.org.
