EDMONTON - When two concussions kept David Obert home from school for more than a year, the Edmonton youth wasn’t sure what his future held. The head injuries, the first suffered during a hockey game, the second in a ski racing accident, left him severely fatigued and unable to concentrate.
His teachers were worried he wouldn’t graduate high school.
Now Obert is 23, in his second year at Harvard Medical School, and in November was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Up to 11 of the international scholarships are awarded annually in Canada, including three in the prairie region. Obert was chosen from a pool of 55 candidates from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Next year he will take a leave of absence from Harvard to pursue a double masters at Oxford University, studying public policy and global health science.
“There were times when I doubted what was going to happen,” Obert said of the period before he was able to rejoin his classmates at Tempo School in south Edmonton. “I just took it one day at a time. Through a lot of hard work, dedication and obviously luck — and on top of that, an extremely supportive family and teachers and friends — I was able to make it out of there.”
Sheila Colwell was Obert’s homeroom teacher when he returned to Tempo in Grade 10. The dedicated and intelligent student was now at a huge disadvantage, sometimes unable to even stay awake during class. Some at Tempo, a private school in Riverbend with a strong focus on academics, weren’t sure he would make it, she said.
But Obert had “an indomitable will that he would conquer this,” said Colwell, who has since retired.
“For him to do that is really amazing. He did beat the odds. He became a really mature and settled and confident but really humble young man,” she said.
Colwell wrote one of the six reference letters Obert required for his Rhodes application. She enthusiastically recommended him, she said.
“I think he’s like a mountain climber. He climbs mountains because they’re there. All these challenges pop up in front of him and he just decides to go for it,” she said.
The period was trying and Obert doesn’t like to emphasize it, preferring to concentrate on what he has done since.
During his bachelor of science studies at McGill University, Obert won a scholarship to work as a summer student in Dr. Michael Weinfeld’s lab at the Cross Cancer Institute. It’s a highly competitive program, said Weinfeld, so all the students are intelligent. Obert stood out for his personality, ambitious but modest.
“He’s a very impressive guy. But on top of that, he’s just an exceptionally nice chap,” he said.
Obert also spent a semester during his undergrad on field studies in Africa and is currently involved with a joint Harvard/NATO team studying and developing health policy for fragile countries, like Haiti.
He hopes the combination of medicine and policy will take him around the globe. For now he makes it home during most holidays, but knows that may become more difficult as his clinical training progresses.
“My heart is still in Alberta and I absolutely love it there,” he said by phone from Boston. He last returned to Edmonton for the Rhodes interview in November.
As he anxiously awaited the decision of the selection committee, his father took him to see the Oilers play the Chicago Blackhawks. During the game, he got the call confirming he had won the scholarship.
“On top of that, it turned into one of the best games I had seen in a long time,” he said.
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