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Admission to Harvard Medical School and post-graduate studies
After her graduation from U.P., President Manuel Quezon offered del Mundo a full scholarship to any school in the United States for further training in a medical field of her choice. She accepted the offer and chose to go to Harvard, arriving at Harvard Medical School in 1936. She was unwittingly enrolled in Harvard Medical School, an institution which did not yet then admit female students. As recounted in her official Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation biography:
[Del Mundo] humorously relates that when she arrived in Boston and went to the dormitory assigned her in a letter from the director of the hospital housing, much to her surprise she found herself in a men's dorm. Unknowingly the Harvard officials had admitted a female to their all-male student body. But because her record was so strong the head of the pediatrics department saw no reason not to accept her. Thus, upsetting Harvard tradition, she became the first Philippine woman and the only female at the time to be enrolled at the Harvard Medical School.
Some sources cite del Mundo as the first woman ever enrolled in Harvard Medical School, or the first woman to be enrolled at Pediatrics at the school, or even the first Asian admitted to the Harvard Medical School. On this point, del Mundo herself would acknowledge only that she was "the first [woman] coming from [as] far [as the Philippines]". However, Harvard Medical School began to accept female students only in 1945, some years after del Mundo was enrolled in the school.
Del Mundo remained in HMS until 1938, completing 3 Pediatric courses. She then took up a residency at the Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago, before returning to Massachussets in 1939 for a two-year research fellowship at the Harvard Medical School Children's Hospital. She also enrolled at the Boston University School of Medicine, earning a Master's degree in bacteriology in 1940.
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