As a child, she treated her dolls with the doctor’s kit she had specifically asked her mother for. Marielle Gawryluk always wanted to become a doctor. “I have a caring personality and I love people. Of course, between the games played in childhood, the questions of adolescence and the choices of young adulthood, I considered other careers, but I kept coming back to medicine,” says this soft-spoken family physician who now practises in her native Manitoba. A gifted student, she worked hard and was eager to succeed. She studied straight through in French, starting in elementary school. However, to pursue a medical degree in French, she had to uproot her life and make the difficult move to Ottawa. “At that time, there were no French medical courses in Manitoba, a bilingual component has since been created. For me, a reserved person by nature, leaving my family and friends and moving across the country to study in Ottawa was not easy. I had underestimated the shock of the transition,” Marielle Gawryluk states simply. But studying in French was worth the effort. “Many of my friends did not keep up their French and have since lost the language. My parents don’t define themselves as Francophones, although my mother learned French at university, but my grandparents are, on both sides of the family. It’s something that really interests me!”
