Fourth-year medical student Erin Jones has taken the road less traveled on her way to a degree in medicine. By her own admission, hers was a circuitous path. And over the years, she’s toyed with various jobs – English teacher, community outreach organizer, even considering work as a parole officer. But each step led her closer to her eventual medical career.

On her personal path to the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Jones also amassed quite a bit of student loan debt. Though the average amount of debt for a recent medical school graduate nears $140,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, for Jones it was nearly triple that.

“Can you believe that? It is like dealing in Monopoly money,” Jones said.

Scholarships become a lifeline in financing a student’s dream to become a physician. Twenty-one scholarship recipients took the opportunity to personally thank their scholarship donors on Nov. 18 at the Annual Scholarship Luncheon held in Hoffman Hall.

Jones herself has received numerous scholarships over the years, including the Frances Silver Primary Care Award, and gave the keynote speech at the event.

In her speech, she acknowledged the generosity of her patrons, Steven and Merle Sapkin, and told how their funding has given her opportunities to enhance her medical education that would be otherwise impossible. The scholarship aid also influenced her choice to pursue work in family medicine – one of the lowest paying among physician salaries.

“Family medicine is a difficult specialty to choose today,” she said to the nearly 80 people in attendance. “Through generous donors like all of you here today, I will not only be able to pay off what my husband and I lovingly refer to as ‘our debt’ in a shorter amount of time…but I have also been able to use some of these funds to enhance my education while in school.”

This has included volunteer outreach in places like Swaziland, Africa (which has the world’s highest HIV infection rate), as well as extracurricular opportunities like learning alternative therapies, nutrition and holistic patient care.

According to Erin Quinn, associate dean for admissions at the Keck School, scholarships allow students to pursue their passions without worrying about debt. “It frees students like Erin [Jones] to choose an area they are interested in that may not be as lucrative as a specialty field,” she says.

“These scholarship luncheons give donors a chance to meet the students they are funding. That is magic. They know the money they are giving to the Keck School is going to a good cause,” she says.