On the Path to Healthcare, Pathio is Paving the Way
The pathway into medicine is notoriously rigid, leaving little room for mistakes. For many first-generation students, entering the field requires constant improvisation. Without experience or established networks to lean on, students must decipher the long-accepted, unspoken rules of higher education, while balancing coursework, personal life, and career planning.
“I had to figure it out all by myself,” says Doston Karimov, “I started to become more resourceful and play the cards that were given to me.” For Karimov, moving through the unclear path to college and medical school without structured guidance was a defining, sometimes daunting, experience. It revealed how many students from Central Asian and other underserved communities lacked access to mentors who understood their cultural backgrounds and experiences. That reality inspired him to launch Pathio, a New York City-based, student-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making those pathways more accessible.
While Pathio officially launched in February, the groundwork began months earlier. Starting in November, the team spent winter break handling documentation, producing articles, and building a foundation of mentors to ensure they had enough support ready for their inaugural onboarding. Since then, Pathio has grown into a network of 70 to 80 participants, including roughly 35 mentor-mentee pairs, with some mentors doubling up to meet demand.
Their growth reflects what Karimov — a student at Hunter College involved in existing mentorship programs — recognized throughout those spaces, where much of the guidance available felt disconnected from students’ lived experiences. “What better way to do this [than to] create a group of students where you can get real insight from the students themselves?” he tells EnVi.
Redefining What it Means to be a Resource
At its core, Pathio is built around the idea that mentorship is best when centered on shared experiences. Instead of top-down advising, the organization relies on students to guide others through the exact systems and processes they are or have recently navigated themselves.
Serving as a source of both cultural representation and inspiration, Karimov explains that seeing peers “from similar backgrounds, just one step ahead” helps mentees imagine their own paths more clearly. Browsing the organization’s “Pathway Guides,” written by and for students, shows that ethos in action. Contributors in fields like pre-med, optometry, and nursing write from recent experience, offering advice alongside honest reflections on uncertainty, setbacks, and lessons learned. For the team behind Pathio, the tools offered are not limited to study materials, internships, or application guides. Time, encouragement, and access to community are treated as resources in their own right.
Highlighting his Central Asian and Uzbek background, Karimov explains, “It’s all about community and about coming together… We do things together, we share our problems — ‘how can I help you or can you help support me with this?’ — so this is just another aspect of that culture and that tradition.”
Pathways and Pathos
The organization’s name is a purposeful blend of its core values, combining “pathways” to represent a clear roadmap for first-generation and underserved students navigating higher education with “pathos,” emphasizing “empathy and the human side of mentorship, education, and healthcare.” Essentially, Karimov says, it represents “people helping people navigate paths that can sometimes feel confusing or inaccessible.”
The combination feels fitting for the work they’re undertaking, as it’s not simply about providing information in the form of facts and figures, but instead using real relationships and community to make those complex pathways feel manageable. It shows aspiring students that they don’t need to abandon ambitions simply because of fear or an unfamiliar system.
With members between ages 18 to 22, Pathio’s network spans a range of undergraduate and graduate stage students. While some are freshmen mapping out prerequisites, others are college seniors or young alumni already moving through their first years of medical, dental, and optometry school. By centering this close-knit, peer-to-peer connection, Pathio answers the vital questions that so often leave learners in the dark, from which classes to take and where to find internships, to what to expect next.
Building the Infrastructure
Pathio Buddies, a mentorship pairing initiative, transforms the cultural emphasis on community into a system of support. Rather than treating mentorship as a one-size-fits-all exchange, the program pairs students based on academic interests, career goals, language needs, and communication preferences. A high school student interested in nursing may be matched with a mentor who recently experienced that same path, a student more fluent in another language may be paired with someone who shares it. The process is purposefully personal, shaped by students who have experienced the uncertainty of navigating higher education without a roadmap.
Building this network from scratch, however, comes with real hurdles. “Outreach has been the most challenging part,” Karimov admits. As an entirely student-led organization, the team has had to lean into their own resourcefulness to expand visibility. “We’ve actually spent money out of our own pockets to advertise our posts, just to reach more people and let them know these mentoring initiatives and articles exist.”
To widen their reach, Pathio partners with local college clubs and institutions, leveraging existing student networks. They also lean into digital platforms as key parts of their infrastructure. Through Pathio Perspectives, the team hosts virtual panel sessions with practicing healthcare professionals to break down graduate school routes and day-to-day medical careers. These sessions are later edited and shared across social platforms, including short-form TikTok content alongside YouTube and Spotify uploads. The reward for that digital and in-person presence often shows up in profoundly personal ways, as approval doesn’t come from numbers, but from the growing confidence and clarity of the students they serve.
Understanding the Impact
“Just getting to speak with these mentees really shows the effect,” Doston says. “Hearing them say, ‘That really helped me out, now I’m able to do this. Thank you so much’… maybe it’s just the med person in me that sees that and [thinks] ‘Oh wow. I made a little bit of an impact on [someone’s] journey,’ that’s been the most rewarding aspect.”
Sometimes, that reassurance extends to students’ families, where pursuing a highly competitive path like healthcare without an existing blueprint or network can raise doubts about whether the path is truly attainable.
“I’ve talked to mentees who told me, ‘It’s amazing that people from our culture are pursuing this, I didn’t even know it was possible or how to get started,'” Karimov recalls. Some faced parents who were initially unsupportive because they believed opportunities in healthcare were too out of reach, largely because they had rarely seen people from their community pursue similar careers. Exposure to Pathio, however, helped shift their perspective.
While Karimov notes that traditional mentorship may be “more reputable” and carry “better credibility,” they often miss the element of connection. “I’ve been a mentor for these other programs, but I rarely see people that are from my own community coming in and asking questions or being mentees. I’ve used the things that they do to bring it over to help build my own grassroots initiative.”
Rewriting the Rules of Mentorship
Within Pathio, mentorship is about creating a culture of continuous knowledge and resource sharing. If Pathio’s current work focuses on helping younger students navigate educational systems, their long-term vision is rooted in the broader belief that access to information can transform entire communities. Achieving that scale, however, requires shifting long-held perspectives. “First, the mentality needs to change,” Karimov says. “When you see kids [from similar backgrounds] pursuing medicine or college, you think, ‘I can do the same for myself. I can do the same for my kids.’ They don’t have to be limited.”
That shift extends beyond college admissions or career paths,it begins when younger students see people from similar cultural backgrounds succeeding in spaces that may once have felt inaccessible.
Karimov hopes this same model of knowledge-sharing can eventually extend beyond academia altogether, and into health literacy among older generations. Through his work in a local nursing home, he’s witnessed firsthand how chronic conditions, like hypertension and diabetes, are complicated further by language barriers, unfamiliar healthcare systems, or a lack of culturally relevant information about prevention and treatment. In immigrant communities, trust can be just as significant a barrier as physical access itself.
With cultural awareness, Pathio aims to address these barriers head-on by preparing a future workforce of providers who come from and understand these communities. Though many mentors within the organization are still undergraduates, the network creates a direct line of guidance stretching from practicing healthcare professionals down to younger students, making medicine clear and accessible.
The organization’s approach relies on both relatability and proximity, highlighting the power of youth-led outreach and experience. Through their work, they guide groups that traditional systems often struggle to reach, from the elderly isolated by cultural or institutional barriers to the youth who are frequently dismissed as too inexperienced to lead. That duality (being close in age to their peers and deeply familiar with cultural concerns) allows them to build a level of trust that traditional institutions can sometimes miss.
By changing perspectives, Pathio is transferring confidence alongside their insights. While the young mentors will eventually transition into professional healthcare workers who return to their communities as trusted voices, they aren’t waiting until they reach that professional milestone to make an impact. Instead, they are leveraging the value of their current experiences to start that work exactly where they are. Within this set pathway, knowledge is meant to restore a collective belief in what is possible, reminding those they reach, “You’re not the only one on this pathway, and you’re not the only one in this journey.”
For more on founders bringing community to the forefront, read EnVi’s article on snail mail clubs here!
