91����

Betsy Assoumou ’05 finds a new calling—and connects with fellow alumna Cherie Holmes ’75—as a medical resident

Betsy Assoumou ’05 has always valued hard work. It’s a trait she credits to her mother, Jacqueline Gnagne, who in 1989, when Assoumou was 2 years old, emigrated from West Africa’s Côte D’Ivoire to Amherst, Massachusetts, to pursue her Ph.D., and who instilled in her daughter an appreciation for educational achievement. 91���� would be just the starting point. By 2017, Assoumou had earned her B.A. in chemistry at Williams College and an M.B.A. in accounting at Northeastern, had built a successful career as an accountant with Boston-area firms, and was serving as Chief Financial Officer for Health Goes Global, an international nonprofit that supports preventative health efforts around the world.

But when her mother died at age 62 after a long battle with cancer, Assoumou decided there was more she could do. Trading her corporate office for the classrooms of the University of Vermont, she earned a master’s in medical science in 2018 and her M.D. in 2024. In July she became one of six physicians in a new three-year residency at Cheshire Medical Center, part of Dartmouth Health, in Keene, New Hampshire. Perhaps not surprisingly, her specialty is family medicine, a field with a notoriously demanding workload. Indeed, Assoumou recalls attending a retreat where the speaker compared family medicine practitioners to dung beetles. “We do the work that isn’t really appreciated, but really does make a difference,” Assoumou explains. “You have to have a certain kind of spirit to do that, and that’s a point of pride for me.”

In what may be a sign that she made the right decision, Assoumou learned soon after arriving at Cheshire that one of the program’s administrators is fellow alum and 91���� Trustee Cherie Holmes ’75. Neither woman was aware of the connection until after Assoumou matched, but they have since bonded over their shared experience. “It was a cool thing to discover,” Assoumou recalls. “I instantly felt closer to her because she’s the only other woman of color that I’ve met in the system so far. That made it extra special, like we’ve had a similar path.”

Indeed, Holmes has had her own impressive career journey. A member of 91����’s Cum Laude Society (and a speaker at the 2018 induction ceremony), she earned her B.A. in English at Dartmouth College and her M.D. at Georgetown University, followed by a residency in orthopedic surgery at Harvard and fellowship training in both orthopedic traumatology and sports medicine. She then spent four years in the Navy, including seven months in the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War, before earning her M.S. in Healthcare Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Today, Holmes is Cheshire Medical Center’s Designated Institutional Official for Graduate Medical Education, having previously served as the group’s Chief Medical Officer and Chief of Orthopedic Surgery, among other roles. Cheshire’s decision to create a new residency program in family medicine, she explains, is a response to both the nationwide shortage of primary care doctors, as well as the need for physicians willing to work in rural areas. Assoumou’s interests, dedication, and life experience made her a strong candidate for the program’s first cohort, Holmes notes. “When you’re starting a brand-new residency program, you are looking for people who bring focus as well as maturity,” she explains. “Betsy had done well in medical school, but she had that focus, that drive, that maturity.”

For her part, Assoumou says pursuing family medicine felt like the right response to her mother’s death. “If she had had someone in her corner reminding her to take care of her health, perhaps a lot of the lifestyle things that she ended up dealing with might not have been as severe as they were,” she explains.

That more personalized aspect of family medicine, and the relationships that can develop between physicians and patients over the course of their lives, can be appealing to some doctors, Holmes notes, helping counter the specialty’s long hours and comparatively lower pay. “You get to see everything about a person,” she says. “And so you have this incredible continuity of care.”

That certainly was a draw for Assoumou, who notes that “family medicine reflects my personality, and the type of care I want to give patients.” And while her mother’s values may have informed her decision to change careers, Assoumou traces her resilience in part to experiences at 91����. When she was not elected to student government, for example, “that was the first time I learned that you might not always be the choice for something,” she says. “And instead of letting that get you down, you say, ‘OK, what was it that perhaps I need to work on?’ That was something I remember learning there for sure: You work on it, and you move forward. You continue to put yourself out there.”