Personal Experiences Drive Diverse Student Body

First-year Foster School of Medicine student Melissa Esparza has dreamed of this opportunity since she was a child, growing up just a couple miles south of El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

At 12, she and her family moved to El Paso, fleeing a wave of violence that emerged on the other side of the Rio Grande.

Melissa Esparza

“I understood as a woman in Mexico, my opportunities were limited. If I were to have a job, it would have to be in a safe and monitored area. A job with night shifts seemed out of the question,” Esparza said.

Since 2009, the Foster School of Medicine has educated nearly 800 graduates who have become or are becoming practicing physicians. Joining the workforce ensures that Health Professional Shortage Areas like the Borderplex – which includes Texas, New Mexico and Mexico – will meet the demand for access to patient care.

A few feet from where medical students train, Anna Ceniceros, a second-year Hunt School of Dental Medicine student, is improving her dentistry skills in the school’s Dental Learning Center.

Ceniceros, the daughter of hardworking migrant farmworkers, arrived in El Paso from Clarendon, Texas, a Panhandle town with a population of just over 2,000.

In elementary school, Ceniceros attended a field trip to a dentist two hours from her hometown. She didn’t know who a dentist was or what they did. The experience – with a provider who patiently explained procedures and calmed her nerves – changed her life. She never stopped thinking about becoming a dentist. 

“Coming from an underserved area has been integral in my desire to become a dentist,” said Ceniceros. “Now I’m sitting in the dentist’s chair doing what I’ve dreamed about for decades.”

Second-year dental student Anna Ceniceros was given a sticker from a caring, patient dentist at her first dental visit. That visit became the catalyst for her drive to become a dentist in an underserved community.

In her second year of dental school, Ceniceros is also mastering medical Spanish. The Hunt School of Dental Medicine is the first in the U.S. with a medical Spanish requirement, and the school’s curriculum also includes clinical experiences within the first semester, a nontraditional approach among most dental schools.

This year, the 61-member class of 2026 joined Ceniceros’s inaugural class of 40. Over a third of the class of 2026 come from West Texas and the U.S.-Mexico border region, including three from New Mexico.

Because most graduating dentists establish practices near their schools, the school will alleviate a shortage of dentists in the Borderplex.

In addition to adding more physicians and dentists to the workforce, TTUHSC El Paso is educating future biomedical researchers at the Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences who study the dynamics of health conditions affecting Hispanic populations.

Research conducted by faculty and students at TTUHSC El Paso is crucial in saving lives among our community due to cutting-edge studies that produce results specifically for people of our border region. Often, minorities, including Hispanics, are excluded in studies and clinical trials, meaning the results of those initiatives rarely benefit residents of El Paso County, 82.9% of whom are Hispanic.