Ola Hadaya recently entered the medical residency program in obstetrics and gynecology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At age 21, she is one of the youngest physicians in the United States. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges only two of every 1,000 students enter medical school as teenagers. Dr. Hadaya did it at age 17.
Dr. Hadaya started high school at age 11 and graduated at the age of 15. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Rutgers in Middle Eastern studies with a minor in biology when she was 17 years old. Dr. Hadaya was one of 300 students accepted for admission at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit from a pool of more than 4,500 applicants. She completed medical school at the age of 21. Not surprisingly, she was the youngest in her graduating class. Dr. Hadaya is fluent in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
Her Syrian-born father, who is also a physician, was the driving force in propelling his daughter through the educational system at such a fast pace. She skipped, third, fifth, and seventh grades. “Convincing the schools was one of the biggest challenges in all this,” notes Dr. Hadaya. “If my parents weren’t so persistent, nothing would have happened – not for the lack of intellect on my part, but merely because there was little precedence.”