Diego Cisneros: Advancing Healthcare Equity Through Mentorship and Medicine

For Diego Cisneros, medicine has always been personal. Long before he became a medical student at UCLA, his understanding of healthcare was shaped by his family’s experience as immigrants from Mexico and the fear that often came with seeking medical care. Growing up, Diego saw how concerns around documentation status, cost, and trust in the healthcare system made traditional healthcare feel inaccessible for many families like his own.’ Instead, his family often relied on ‘hueseros,’ along with herbal remedies, traditional practices, and community-based forms of care.  Those early experiences became part of the reason he chose medicine: he wanted to become the kind of physician who could understand, reassure, and advocate for patients who may feel afraid or excluded from the healthcare system.

Diego’s journey to medical school began at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a place he chose partly because it allowed him to stay close to his family in Chicago while also giving him access to strong academic and medical networks. At UW–Madison, he found mentorship early through organizations like PALMA, where a medical student mentor helped connect him with physicians, research opportunities, and guidance on how to navigate the pre-med path. As a first-generation college student, Diego remembers how overwhelming it felt to enter higher education without many examples in his family to follow. CeO played an important role in helping him understand the “hidden curriculum” of college and pre-med life, from choosing classes to building a realistic schedule and preparing for the long road to medical school.

That support has shaped the way Diego now sees mentorship. As Mentorship Chair for LMSA, he hopes to offer other students the same kind of guidance that helped him. Whether through interview practice, MCAT advice, panels, or one-on-one support, Diego wants younger students to know that they do not have to figure everything out alone. For him, mentorship is not only about giving advice, but also about reminding students that they belong in spaces that may sometimes feel intimidating or competitive.

At UCLA, Diego has continued to build a path defined by service, representation, and healthcare equity. He is especially interested in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R), a specialty focused on helping patients restore function after injury, illness, stroke, spinal cord injury, or chronic pain. His interest in PM&R connects closely to his own community. Growing up around family members and community members who worked physically demanding jobs, Diego saw how injuries and chronic pain could affect a person’s ability to work, support their family, and maintain financial stability. He hopes to use PM&R to help patients manage pain, regain independence, and return to daily life with dignity.

Diego has also found meaningful ways to serve Spanish-speaking and underserved communities in Los Angeles. Through his involvement with La Cosecha , he helps provide health education and basic screenings such as blood pressure and glucose checks for migrant farm workers in Ventura County in north California, while also supporting education around topics like heat illness and CPR. For Diego, these experiences reflect one of the reasons he chose UCLA: the opportunity to learn in a diverse environment where healthcare disparities are visible and where students can take part in efforts to address them.

His advice to current students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, is simple but powerful: do not compare your journey to anyone else’s. Diego knows how easy it is for pre-med students to feel pressure to do everything at once, but he encourages students to stay grounded in their own “why.” For him, that “why” was always about helping people who looked like him and came from similar backgrounds. He reminds students that their story matters, and that the strongest path is not always the one filled with the most activities, but the one that reflects their purpose.

Diego Cisneros’s story is one of persistence, mentorship, and commitment to community. From UW–Madison to UCLA, he has carried with him the lessons of family, identity, and service. As he continues his journey in medicine, he remains focused on opening doors for others, building trust with patients, and showing future students that they, too, belong.

Please visit: La Cosecha, MD student organization at ULCA