The Woman Helping Students Find The Path To Medicine: An Interview with Dr. Nadege Dady

For most of her career, Dr. Nadege Dady has been driven by one relentless question:
What happens to students who are capable, motivated, and determined, but lack the right information or access at the right moment?

It is a question that has shaped every chapter of her life in higher education. Today, Dady is the Dean of Student Affairs and a Clinical Associate Professor at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem, where she oversees admissions, financial aid, the registrar, the bursar, and the full landscape of student life. She is also an author and a recent recipient of the Vanguard Medical Education Award from Haiti Premiere Classe for her impact on medical education and the Haitian community.

She sat down for an interview for Tutors, Mentors, and The City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to talk about imposter syndrome, student debt, belonging, and why clarity of purpose is often the most powerful form of capital a student can have.

“I always tell students that your circumstances might shape your start,” she says. “But they should never be allowed to define your ceiling.”

What begins as a story about medicine becomes something broader: a blueprint for how access, mentorship, and belief interact to change who gets to stay in the room.

From Brooklyn classrooms to Harlem’s medical campus

Dady was born and raised in Brooklyn in a Haitian household where education was not optional and discipline was assumed. She attended Catholic school from kindergarten through twelfth grade, then went on to Hunter College at CUNY as a communications major with a minor in science. Medicine was already in view. So was uncertainty.

Like many first-generation students, she was strong academically but navigating a system no one had fully taught her how to interpret. She planned for medical school, but gaps in guidance, access, and timing reshaped her path. Instead of leaving higher education, she leaned further into it.

A master’s degree in education followed at Fordham. Then a doctorate in higher education leadership, management, and policy at Seton Hall. What began as a detour became a mission.

“I realized that I could either be shaped by my own obstacles,” she says, “or I could become the person who helps remove them for others.”

That decision took her into student affairs and eventually to Touro’s Harlem campus, directly across from the Apollo, where future doctors now walk through her office every day carrying the same questions she once had.

The hidden weight of imposter syndrome

Long before it became a widely used phrase, Dady was living what researchers now call belonging uncertainty. Even when she succeeded, there was often a quiet voice asking whether she truly belonged.

“I had the capacity. I had the work ethic,” she says. “What I sometimes lacked was the roadmap.”

Today, she sees that same pattern in countless students. Many of them arrive academically strong, deeply motivated, and quietly unsure if the room was ever meant for them.

“For students underrepresented in medicine, doubt doesn’t come from inside first,” she says. “It’s reinforced by what they don’t see around them.”

Her work as Dean places her at the intersection of admissions, financial aid, policy, and student wellbeing. She does not just help students get in. She helps them stay.

What osteopathic medicine really demands

To outsiders, the difference between an MD and a DO can seem abstract. To Dady, it is central to how she frames medical training.

Osteopathic physicians complete the same four-year structure as MDs, two years of rigorous science coursework followed by two years of clinical rotations. DO students also receive specialized training in osteopathic principles, with a focus on holistic care and the musculoskeletal system.

“It’s not just about treating the disease,” she says. “It’s about treating the whole patient.”

That mindset mirrors how she approaches students. Academic performance matters. So does mental health. So does food security. So does housing stability. None of it can be separated.

Debt, delay, and the cost of believing late

Medical school is expensive. Dady is blunt about it.

Student debt, she explains, rarely starts in medical school. It accumulates across undergraduate years, graduate programs, and living costs. She carries her own educational debt and speaks about it openly with students.

“I never want fear of cost to be the silent reason someone gives up,” she says. “But I also won’t pretend the numbers aren’t real.”

What she teaches instead is strategy. Apply early. Build a realistic academic plan. Seek mentors who will be honest about readiness. Learn how to position yourself for scholarships, service programs, and long-term planning.

“Debt should be managed with information,” she says. “Not avoided with silence.”

Teaching as an act of belonging

One of the programs Dady helps lead is a Harlem-based mini-med school for high school students, taught by Touro’s own medical students after full days of class. Teenagers show up week after week for months.

When she reads their evaluations, the comments are rarely about curriculum first. They are about feeling seen.

“They talk about smiles,” she says. “They talk about being welcomed. They talk about feeling like doctors believed in them.”

She sees teaching not as content delivery but as cultural translation. The science matters. So does how it is offered.

“Representation alone isn’t enough,” she says. “Students need warmth. They need access. They need imagination.”

Purpose as survival, not branding

Throughout the conversation, Dady returned again and again to one idea: your why.

Medicine is long. Education is slow. Progress is uneven. Students will fail exams. Families will face crises. Grief will interrupt plans.

“If your why is shallow,” she says, “burnout will find you fast.”

Her own why is rooted in watching students from historically excluded communities step into careers they were once told were unrealistic. In seeing future patients meet doctors who look like them. In watching first-generation students learn the rules of rooms that once felt locked.

“Purpose doesn’t remove pain,” she says. “It gives you a reason to keep walking through it.”

“You belong here”

At the end of the interview, Dady returned to the students she speaks to every day, many of whom arrive convinced that they are already behind.

Her message to them is steady.

It is not too late. Your route does not have to mirror anyone else’s. Information can be learned. Mentorship can be built. Belonging can be claimed.

“There are people out here who will hold the door,” she says. “But you still have to walk through it.”

Her career does not follow a single straight line: Brooklyn classrooms to CUNY, Fordham to Seton Hall, pre-med to policy, student to dean. What ties it together is not prestige, but refusal. Refusal to let a system quietly decide who gets excluded.

And a commitment to make sure students hear, loudly and often, the truth she once had to learn for herself:

You belong here.