It’s fair to say Valeria Silva Merea’s career began with a splash. Just four days before the Peruvian native boarded a plane bound for medical school in New York, she was in Beijing swimming in the 2008 Olympic Games. She broke the Peruvian national record for the 100-meter breaststroke, shaving two seconds off the time she swam in Athens in 2004.
“The transition was smooth other than the jet lag,” says Silva Merea, now 26, who on May 16 will graduate from the College of Physicians and Surgeons. In June, she will begin her residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery on her way to becoming an ear, nose and throat specialist.
The scholar and athlete, who hails from an athletic family in Lima, Peru—her parents played on the national volleyball team (her mother, at the 1976 Olympics) and her siblings were awarded tennis scholarships—says the transition from Olympic swimmer to doctor was a natural one. “For both, you need to put in a lot of time and training,” she says. “And you have to be part of a team.”
Just as Silva Merea has excelled in the pool, she has stood out in the classroom and long wanted to become a doctor. In 2008, she was a finalist for the Walter Byers Scholarship, the NCAA’s highest academic award. This April, she worked a clinical rotation in infectious disease at a public hospital in Lima, becoming familiar with conditions she doesn’t often see in New York and familiarizing herself with Spanish medical terminology. The stint, she says, was a great learning experience and an opportunity to compare the resources and systems of a public hospital in her country to those she has seen during her training.
Silva Merea, who approached her studies with the same discipline that she applied to athletics, began swimming at the age of 5. She loved it and a couple of years later started competing for a local swim club. That’s when she decided she wanted to be an Olympian. She went on to win her first international medal a few years later.
“I was very disciplined from an early age. I was always trying to find ways to improve and get better,” she says, adding that those considerations were extended to how she managed her diet, sleep schedule and social life.
Her efforts—which included training five hours per day—paid off; in 2003 she was awarded a scholarship to train in Australia and another to swim at the University of Michigan starting in 2004. She was one of 12 athletes, and the only female swimmer, to represent Peru in Athens. At the Beijing Games, she was one of only 13. “I felt so proud to be there for my country,” she says.
Silva Merea no longer has time to swim five hours a day, but over the past four years she has found some relief from her studies through the P&S Club, a student activities organization at Physicians and Surgeons that sponsors dozens of extracurricular groups including her favorites, the P&S Roadrunners and the Black and Latino Student Organization. Over the past two years, she has competed in four JackRabbit Indoor Triathlons—she won two of them, qualifying her for the championship race both years—and hopes one day to participate in the New York City Triathlon.
Though she valued her recent work in Peru, she’s unsure where she’ll land after she completes her residency. As Silva Merea says, “A lot can happen in five years.”
