My parents were calved successful 1911. They faced challenges that haven’t changed overmuch for students today: the quality to spend education, being a woman, being a number — Janet Yagoda Shagam
Janet Yagoda Shagam (PhD ’86) understands excessively well the sacrifices students, professors and wellness attraction professionals marque for their vocations.
She is the girl of parents who had to flooded important challenges to their vocation goals. Her in-laws coped with akin challenges.
But it wasn’t capable for Yagoda Shagam conscionable to admit their hard enactment and sacrifice. She wanted to springiness backmost arsenic well.
A erstwhile University of New Mexico nonrecreational penning programme lecturer with a inheritance successful biology and microbiology, Yagoda Shagam is besides an creator whose enactment has been shown passim Europe, Israel, China and Japan. After precocious school, she concisely attended the Boston Museum School earlier switching to science.
After arriving successful Albuquerque to gain her PhD successful biology/microbiology, she began taking classes astatine UNM’s world-renowned Tamarind Institute.
“I’ve ever been fascinated by lithography,” she said. “Lithography is precise carnal and requires a just magnitude of chemistry, which makes it appealing to me. Tamarind was my archetypal hands-on acquisition with that. They person a good acquisition programme to bid lithographers, and they acceptable the modular connected a planetary scale.”
Later, she began making gifts to enactment the Institute’s two-year maestro printmaker programme and has supported the schoolhouse financially for respective years.
Art is intrinsic to Yagoda Shagam’s nonrecreational and idiosyncratic life.
“People find it unusual that I relation rather good arsenic a writer, researcher and artist,” she said. “What they don’t recognize is art, subject and penning are each originative and problem-solving ways of thinking. Both penning and creation necessitate aggravated absorption but antithetic kinds of physicality. To consciousness balanced, I person to bash both.”
In 2020, Yagoda Shagam decided to springiness backmost to UNM successful a caller way, via a acquisition to UNM’s La Tierra Sagrada Society (LTSS, the assistance money for UNM School of Medicine students. All gifts spell solely toward providing need-based aesculapian schoolhouse scholarships and increasing the LTSS endowment. She renewed her acquisition successful 2021 and 2022.
Yagoda Shagam’s gifts to LTSS are an homage to Edward Fancovic, MD, who is her superior attraction physician, Interim Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education and a prof successful the Department of Internal Medicine.
She chose to grant Dr. Fancovic due to the fact that of his dedication to acquisition and wellness care.
“Dr. Fancovic has been precise adjuvant to our household successful galore ways,” she said. “And he’s giving a batch of his clip to medical-school education. I’m definite the students are getting the precise champion from him.”
Her respect for the clinicians astatine UNM Hospital besides influenced her decision. “I similar what UNMH does for the community. The module determination is amazing,” she said. “They are inactive learners.”
Gifts similar Yagoda Shagam’s assistance marque it imaginable for students who different whitethorn not beryllium capable to spend aesculapian schoolhouse to execute their goals. Many students look further obstacles. Her parents and her father-in-law surely did.
“My parents were calved successful 1911,” Yagoda Shagam said. “They faced challenges that haven’t changed overmuch for students today: the quality to spend education, being a woman, being a minority.”
Her parent wanted to beryllium a pathologist. Growing up successful a tiny Connecticut town, she had fewer options aft precocious school. So, she moved to New York City and attended Hunter College astatine nighttime portion moving during the day. However, aft 2 years, the demands of matrimony and household took precedence implicit higher education.
When Yagoda Shagam’s begetter tried to get into postgraduate school, helium was told the schoolhouse already “had excessively galore Hebrews.” Her father-in-law graduated from aesculapian school, served successful the aesculapian corps during World War II, and tried to find an ophthalmology residency aft his subject service. He was told the aforesaid happening her begetter heard. However, some her begetter and father-in-law persevered and yet reached their goals.
In 2022, Yagoda Shagam made a caller acquisition to UNM’s Special Needs Dentistry programme successful designation of the information that “many radical successful New Mexico cannot spend dental care. Should they person wellness insurance, astir policies don’t springiness capable benefits.” She besides wants to assistance amended entree to care, peculiarly extracurricular of the ample metropolitan areas. “There are fewer dentists and dental hygienists successful agrarian parts of the state.”
Janet Yagoda Shagam’s past of generosity to UNM Health Sciences and the Tamarind Institute is an inspiring illustration of the quality mean radical tin marque to the lives of students and patients via donations of immoderate amount. For her, knowing she tin marque a quality successful the beingness of adjacent 1 pupil is worthy it.
“I privation to springiness UNM’s students arsenic overmuch accidental arsenic I tin truthful they tin springiness backmost to their homes,” she said.
English (US)