Lola Adeyemo is not a name that everyone on campus knows. She’s not famous. She hasn’t found the cure to cancer. The work she has done is the kind that generally goes unnoticed by a lot of people. But getting noticed is not on her mind as she spends hundreds of hours volunteering. In fact, she kind of likes that it’s more “behind-the-scenes” work.
Her favorite part about volunteering are the smiles she gets to see at the end of the day, she said.
“I smile a lot, so to be able to share that with someone is great,” Adeyemo said.
The 20-year-old pre-med sophomore volunteers with Streetlight at Shands at UF, the Mobile Outreach Clinic and does health disparities research at UF.
As a volunteer with Streetlight, she visits patients in the pediatric wing at Shands.
Adeyemo, who hopes to become a pediatrician, said she feels so good after spending time with the kids, and she thinks that will help her when she becomes a doctor.
She said she knows her calling is to work with kids.
With the Mobile Outreach Clinic, Adeyemo helps provides primary and preventive care to people living in rural, under-served neighborhoods of Gainesville.
This semester, she began doing health disparities research for credit, which she will continue next year without credit. She said she originally started doing research at the McKnight Brain Institute. And while she thought it was interesting, she decided it wasn’t for her and realized her passion was community research.
Adeyemo said service is where her heart is, but she never realized how much it would impact her.
She said she remembers going for a walk with an elderly women at Shands because the woman said she just wanted to get out of the hospital.
“At the end of the day, she smiled and said she was glad she walked with me,” Adeyemo said.
It was a moment that made her feel really good, she said.
She volunteered at a nursing home in middle school for an honor society she was in and at different places while she was in high school. But Adeyemo said she’s been volunteering since she can remember.
She wants to be a doctor but also loves singing and is a member of the UF Gospel Choir. She’ll never give up singing, she said.
“Service and singing,” Adeyemo said. “That’s how I’ve made my mark.”
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UFL chapter.