Victor

Ayeni

Hometown: Powder Springs, GA

Undergrad/Medical School: Yale (2020), University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (2024)

What are your career goals? My goal is to become a cardiologist at an academic medical center, where I hope to leverage my role for teaching trainees and for promoting involvement of trainees in their local communities. I especially want to introduce trainees to the historically marginalized in the local community, including immigrants and those with lower income, with the hope that we could learn from and benefit one another as neighbors in the same community.

What inspired you to pursue Internal Medicine? Internal Medicine epitomizes the relational nature of healthcare, which is what I adore most about the field. Healthcare is about helping people overcome illness and live their lives with the highest quality possible. Accordingly, my primary mission as a physician is to learn about patients' health and life goals, then partner with them using my medical training to help them achieve those goals. Internal Medicine's reach into a diversity of settings - acute and chronic, curative and palliative, inpatient and outpatient, individual and communal - allows me to walk with my patients wherever they go, and I hope to hold onto this even if I (God willing) have the honor of specializing in cardiology.

What were you looking for in a residency program, and why did you ultimately choose Duke? For someone like me who wants to learn medicine at the highest level and provide excellent patient care, but who never wants to be to become too snobby to appreciate the small quirks of life, I've found that the ethos of the Duke program was one I could wholeheartedly stand by: "We take medicine very seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously."