This Alum, Now a Neurologist, Wouldn’t Take No for an Answer. Good Thing She Didn’t.

Jarvis, a vascular neurologist at the Miami-Dade Neuroscience Institute (MDNI), boils her success down to three things. “Be nice. Be a team player. And persevere like it’s nobody’s business. That’s 9/10ths of the game right there,” says Jarvis, now the medical director of the Primary Stroke Center at North Shore Medical Center in Miami. She’s also a member of the Advanced Neuroscience Network (ANN), an integrated delivery system of medical professionals and hospitals focused on offering a full continuum of neurological care throughout South Florida. Both North Shore and MDNI are members of the network.

Her medical career spans more than a decade—she’s evaluated NFL athletes from the Jacksonville Jaguars for concussion and possible neurological trauma, spoken on behalf of an international pharmaceutical company on stroke and atrial fibrillation, and served as director of stroke for two separate healthcare facilities.

And she isn’t accustomed to backing down from a challenge. So it makes sense that years ago, when someone told her she had no shot of getting into medical school, she didn’t take no for an answer.

They Said Her Admission Chances Were Zero.

When Jarvis decided to make a career change to medicine—she originally came from the commodities sector, brokering coffees and cocoa in locales ranging from London to Cameroon—it didn’t shake her up much when someone gave her a less-than-favorable prognosis on her chances of getting into medical school.

“He told me my chances were zero,” she says, recalling the conversation between her and the proverbial someone—in this case, a family friend who had served on the board of directors for a United States medical school. It didn’t matter that her grades were great, Jarvis was told: she didn’t have any work experience in medicine, save for when she was a teenager working for her father.