Zindzi Thompson, a 21-year-old Black woman from South Carolina, has made history as the youngest person to graduate from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. She is also the youngest black female graduate of medicine in the United States.

Since she was as little as 3-years old, Zindzi has always dreamed of becoming a doctor. Coming from a family of doctors, her curiosity about the career just kept building up as she was growing up.

The South Carolina native said, “I have always wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember, there’s nothing else that I wanted to be,”.

Zindzi started pursuing her dream career at a very young age. She was just 13 years old when she enrolled at the Mary Baldwin University in Virginia.

Like many parents, Samuel Thompson and Machelle Thompson, who are both attorneys, created an environment and plan to help her achieve her dream. Differently from others, they helped the brilliant young lady achieve those dreams with a mind-boggling intensity and intentionality.

Zindzi father said “A big part of the process has been letting her go and achieve her goal. And that’s been the hardest part. The academics for her and knowing that she was going to do it was easy, but not having your daughter through those years was the hard part,” Samuel Thompson said.

Thompson enrolled at Meharry Medical College, an HBCU in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at 16, following the footsteps of another 12 or more family members who matriculated through the heralded university.

Most recently, Zindzi walked across the stage as the youngest Black woman to graduate from the institution and the youngest Black female graduate of medicine in the whole country at the age of 21. She admitted that there are times she struggled in studying but giving up was never an option.

“Just don’t give up. Just push through. If you have to re-take a course, re-take it and do better — you can do it, it’s not impossible,” she advised.

Thompson doesn’t seem to have any plans post-graduation to slack off, accepting a summer residency in a psychiatry program at Washington University Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.