Brain cancer did not arrive in my life as a statistic. It arrived as a phone call I was not ready for. My stepfather died of brain cancer in Vietnam during my senior year of high school. I was in Massachusetts. I could not be there. I could not hold his hand or say goodbye or be present for my mother in the way she needed. I learned about his death from across an ocean and I had to keep going to school the next day because stopping was not something my family could afford. That experience did not just grieve me. It changed the direction of my life. Brain cancer takes people quietly and catastrophically at the same time. It takes their cognition, their personality, their ability to communicate before it takes their life. It robs families of goodbye. It creates a specific kind of grief — the grief of watching someone disappear before they are gone, and then grieving again when they finally are. My mother lived that. I watched it happen from 8,000 miles away and felt completely powerless. I have channeled that powerlessness into purpose. I am pursuing Biology at San Diego State University with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track with the goal of becoming a dermatologist and researcher focused on diagnostic equity. My research direction — addressing AI diagnostic bias across skin tones — was born directly from my clinical experience and my understanding of what happens when medical tools fail the communities they are supposed to serve. My stepfather was in Vietnam, where access to early detection technology is limited and diagnostic accuracy for certain populations is worse than it is in the United States. I do not know whether earlier detection would have saved him. I know that better diagnostic tools give people a chance that worse tools do not. My advocacy for brain cancer awareness is personal and ongoing. I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform for first-generation pre-medical students — and mental health and family medical history are topics I address directly in that space. I talk honestly about what it means to lose someone to cancer as a first-generation immigrant student who could not be present for the death. That conversation matters because it is one that most pre-medical platforms do not have. I also volunteer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston — one of the leading academic medical centers in the country for cancer research and treatment. That experience has deepened my understanding of what patients and families face inside the healthcare system and reinforced my commitment to a medical career that centers on the patient experience. This scholarship would directly fund my first year of college — reducing the debt I carry into medical school and giving me the financial stability to focus on the research and clinical work that will eventually make me a better physician. Every dollar I do not borrow is a dollar I can invest in the work itself. My stepfather deserved better medicine. I intend to spend my career building it.

Faith in my family is not something you talk about. It is something you live in the dark. My father leaves before I wake up. He drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. He came to the United States from Vietnam with nothing — no connections, no roadmap, no guarantee that it would work. What he had was the same thing the founders of this scholarship had. The willingness to show up every single day and trust that the work would eventually mean something. I grew up watching that. I grew up Catholic at St. Christine's Parish in Marshfield, Massachusetts, attending Mass on Sundays with my father, even on the weeks when showing up was the hardest thing either of us had to do. There were weeks like that. Weeks when my stepfather was dying of cancer in Vietnam, and my father was exhausted beyond what rest could fix, and I was carrying more than a teenager should carry. We went anyway. Not because we had answers. Because faith is not about having answers. It is about showing up in the absence of them. That practice saved me during the hardest year of my life. My senior year of high school nearly broke me. My stepfather died. Depression returned. My father filed for bankruptcy. I failed my second term. Everything I had built felt like it was collapsing at once. What kept me moving was not optimism. It was the same thing faith had always taught me — that suffering is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of what you do with it. I came back. Stronger grades. Clearer direction. Unbroken purpose. Faith will help me in my career in two specific ways. First, it will make me a better physician. Medicine requires showing up for people in their most vulnerable moments — delivering hard news, sitting with grief, staying present when the situation has no good answer. My faith has trained me to do exactly that. To be present in the absence of answers. To trust that showing up is enough, even when you cannot fix everything. Second, it will keep me honest as an entrepreneur. I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform providing first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I intend to build a dermatology practice after medical school that serves underserved communities. Both of those endeavors require the same thing the founders of this scholarship built their business on — integrity. The willingness to conduct yourself with honesty, even when shortcuts are available. Faith is what holds me to that standard when nothing else will. The founders of this scholarship came to America with nothing and built something through hard work and faith. My father came to America with nothing and is doing the same thing, one night shift at a time. I am the daughter of that story. I intend to be worthy of it.

Service in my family is not a concept. It is a practice learned by watching my father drive through the night so his daughter could sleep. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old. My father raised me alone in a country that was not built for us. He works without complaint, without recognition, without any guarantee that it will be enough. I grew up understanding that love is not something you announce. It is something you do. It is showing up for people who need you, even when showing up is the hardest thing available to you. That understanding has shaped every form of service I have given. I am a practicing Roman Catholic at St. Christine's Parish in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Faith has been the foundation of how I understand my obligation to others — not as charity but as stewardship. I have been given access, opportunity, and resilience that many people around me have not had. That is not something to keep. It is something to give back. My community service began in ninth grade when I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club at Marshfield High School — because I believed young people should take responsibility for the world they are inheriting. I volunteered in the Surgical Services department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston — because I believe showing up for people in their most vulnerable moments is sacred work. I completed a clinical internship at Lifetime Vision Optometry as the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted — because I believe using your gifts in service of others is not optional. It is the obligation that comes with having gifts at all. I also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform providing first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because service means using what you have been given to make the path easier for the person behind you. I will use my education to serve others in the most direct way I know. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology on a pre-medical track to become a dermatologist who serves underserved communities — immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, patients who navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language. I have already seen what happens when medicine fails people who look like my family. I watched two people I loved die of cancer from the wrong side of the world. The service I am building toward is the medicine that could have saved them. Mrs. Marion Makins spent ninety years embodying what it means to serve — through faith, through education, through community, through the patient and persistent work of uplifting others. She understood that a life of service is not built in grand gestures. It is built one morning at a time, one person at a time, one act of showing up at a time. I learned that from my father. I practice it every day. I intend to build a career from it.

1. About You I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American woman who came to the United States from Ho Chi Minh City at eight years old, speaking only Vietnamese. My father is an immigrant who drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I grew up navigating systems — educational, financial, healthcare, social — that were not designed for people like me. That navigation shaped everything I am. I am resilient not because hardship built character in the abstract but because I had no choice but to develop it concretely, one obstacle at a time. I am pre-medical, a clinical intern, a co-founder, a violinist, a volleyball captain, and the first in my family to attend college. 2. Learning Across Cultures Coming to America at eight meant learning not just a language but an entirely different set of unspoken rules. I learned that in America, you advocate for yourself loudly because silence is interpreted as having nothing to say. In Vietnamese culture, silence often signals respect. Navigating between those two truths taught me that cultural intelligence — the ability to read a room and understand what is expected — is one of the most valuable skills a person can develop. It also taught me that my Vietnamese identity is not something to translate away. It is something to bring fully into every room I enter. 3. Perspective and Growth The most meaningful lesson my educational journey has taught me is that access and ability are not the same thing. I have watched students with far fewer capabilities succeed simply because they had more information, more connections, and more people in their corner. That observation did not make me bitter. It made me intentional. I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform giving first-generation pre-medical students the roadmaps nobody gave us — because the gap between capable students and successful ones is often just information. I intend to close that gap. 4. Education and Future Direction I am pursuing Biology at San Diego State University with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. My goal is to become a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones — specifically addressing AI diagnostic tools that perform less accurately on darker complexions. This scholarship directly supports that path by reducing the financial burden of my first year and allowing me to focus entirely on academics and clinical experience rather than working multiple jobs to survive. Without scholarship support, I cannot attend college. That is the truth of my situation and the real stakes of this application.

My senior year of high school tried to take everything from me at once. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned in a way I had not felt since middle school. My father filed for bankruptcy. I lost friendships. I lost my job. I got sick repeatedly. I failed my second term. I was eighteen years old, carrying the weight of immigration, financial collapse, grief, and mental illness simultaneously while trying to figure out how to become the first person in my family to attend college. That is the adversity I faced. Not one thing. All of it at once. The way I overcame it was not dramatic. There was no single turning point, no moment where everything clicked into place. What happened was simpler and harder than that. I kept showing up. Not because I felt strong. Because my father was driving through the night to keep us housed, stopping felt like wasting every hour he had ever spent doing that. I also had a teacher who refused to look away. Mr. Raymond saw me falling apart in his English class and did not lower his expectations or write me off. He pushed. He checked in. He held steady when I could not. That is what pulled me back — not my own strength alone but one person who refused to let me disappear. That experience shaped me in two specific ways. First it taught me that resilience is not something you perform alone. It is something that becomes possible when someone refuses to give up on you. The most important thing I can do as a future physician is be that person for my patients — the one who stays in the room, asks the question nobody else asked, and makes it safe to say the thing that has never felt safe to say. Second, it showed me that first-generation immigrant students carry a specific kind of weight that most systems are not designed to address. The pressure of being the one who makes it. The silence around struggle in cultures where vulnerability is not safe. The isolation of navigating everything alone. That is why I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform that provides first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. The advice I would give to someone facing what I faced is this. You do not have to be okay. You just have to keep going. Find the one person in your life who sees you clearly and let them help you. Not because you are weak, but because nobody survives the hardest things entirely alone. And when you come out the other side — and you will come out the other side — turn around and become that person for someone else. That is what getting through it is for.

The first problem I solved was the one I lived inside. Nobody told me how pre-medical school actually works. Not how to find research as a freshman. Not how to cold email a professor. Not what clinical hours count or how to write a personal statement that sounds like a real person wrote it. I was a first-generation Vietnamese-American student whose father drives for Uber and Amazon — there was no physician at my dinner table explaining the roadmap. I figured it out late and through luck, and I understood that most students who look like me never figure it out at all. So I built the information that did not exist. I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform providing first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. The platform launched on Instagram this spring. The content is free. The community is real. Every guide I write is a direct response to a gap I personally experienced — a door I prop open for the student who would otherwise have had to find it themselves or not at all. That is the thing I created to solve a problem. It was born from necessity and built from scratch with no resources except time, knowledge, and the absolute refusal to let the next student feel as lost as I did. The second problem I would solve if I had the resources is larger and more technical — and it is the reason I am pursuing Biology with a Data Science minor at San Diego State University. The summer before college I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. In that clinic I observed something I could not stop thinking about. The AI assisted diagnostic tools used in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools produce measurably less accurate results. That is a systemic failure embedded in the infrastructure of modern medicine producing worse outcomes for the patients who are already most underserved. If I had the resources to solve that problem, here is exactly what I would build. A diagnostic equity lab — a research institution dedicated to auditing existing AI medical diagnostic tools for accuracy across all Fitzpatrick skin tone categories and rebuilding training datasets to be fully representative. The lab would partner with dermatology clinics serving underserved communities to collect diverse imaging data with proper informed consent. It would publish its findings openly, so any institution using these tools could implement the corrections. It would train the next generation of computational medicine researchers — specifically recruiting students from underrepresented backgrounds who have personal stakes in solving this problem. The lab would not just fix the tools that exist. It would change who builds the tools that come next. Richard Neumann believed that problem-solving and creative thinking were forms of art. I believe that the most important art is the kind that makes the world work better for the people it has been failing. That is what I am building. That is what I intend to spend my life building.

I grew up in a country that was not built for me. That experience taught me something that shapes everything I do — that the most powerful thing a person can contribute to society is the willingness to see the systems that fail people and build something better. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student graduating from Marshfield High School this spring. I came to the United States at eight years old, speaking only Vietnamese. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I have navigated college applications, financial aid, healthcare, and opportunity without anyone at home who had done it before. Every system I have encountered, I have had to learn from the outside in — not because I was invited in, but because I refused to stay out. That experience is how I became a positive force in my community. Not by fitting into the systems as they exist. By identifying where they fail people who look like me and building alternatives. The summer before college, I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. In that clinic, I observed that AI-assisted diagnostic tools in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones, producing measurably less accurate results for patients with darker complexions. That is a social norm embedded in technology — the assumption that the default patient is white. I am pursuing Biology with a Data Science minor at San Diego State University, specifically to challenge that norm through research. I also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform providing first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. The social norm this platform challenges is that access to medical career guidance is reserved for students with physician parents. That norm produces physicians who do not reflect the communities they serve. FirstWhiteCoat exists to disrupt it. Social norms shape my thinking by showing me exactly where the work needs to be done. The norm that medicine is for certain kinds of people — certain backgrounds, certain skin tones, certain families — is the norm I have spent my entire life pushing against. Every clinical hour I logged, every scholarship essay I wrote, every piece of content I published on FirstWhiteCoat is a direct challenge to that norm. I volunteered in the Surgical Services department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club at Marshfield High School in ninth grade. I have worked since I was sixteen, contributing to household expenses while building the kind of profile that systems told people like me we were not supposed to have. The positive force I am in society right now is a student who refused to accept the norm that said she did not belong. The positive force I will be in the future is a physician and researcher who spends her career making sure the systems that failed her community are rebuilt to serve everyone. That is not idealism. That is the plan.

My academic goal is to become a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones. My professional goal is to build a practice that serves the communities medicine has historically overlooked — immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, patients who navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language and was not built with them in mind. Those goals did not come from a textbook. They came from a clinic. The summer before college, I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment and cared for patients independently at eighteen. In that clinic, I encountered something I could not unfocus on once I saw it. The AI-assisted diagnostic tools used in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools produce measurably less accurate results. That is not a minor technical flaw. It is a systemic failure producing worse outcomes for the patients who are already the most underserved. And it is the problem I intend to spend my career fixing. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall, studying Biology with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. Every course I take is building toward that goal. Giving back to my community has been the through line of my entire high school experience. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club at Marshfield High School in ninth grade. I volunteered in the Surgical Services department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. I completed my clinical internship serving patients who needed someone who spoke their language. And I co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative that provides first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built FirstWhiteCoat because nobody built it for me. Because the gap between a first-generation student and a student with physician parents is not a gap in intelligence or capability. It is a gap in access to information. I have already lived what that gap costs. I refused to let the students who came after me pay the same price. That platform is how community service became something larger than volunteering. It became a structural response to a structural problem. Every piece of content I write on FirstWhiteCoat is a direct investment in a student who might otherwise never find their way into medicine. Every roadmap I publish is a door I prop open for someone who would have had to figure it out alone. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I have worked since I was sixteen, contributing to household expenses while pursuing every opportunity I could find. I have been navigating systems not built for me my entire life. That experience is not a disadvantage to overcome. It is exactly the perspective that medicine needs more of. I intend to spend my career proving that.

Jack Terry arrived in America at fifteen years old with no family, no English, and nothing but the will to keep going. He had survived what most people cannot imagine, and he chose to build something from what remained. That choice — to transform survival into contribution — is the most inspiring thing I have ever read about another person's life. I am eighteen years old. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight. My story is not the Holocaust. I will not pretend otherwise. But I know something about arriving in a country that does not speak your language, about building a life from the margins of a system that was not designed for you, about watching the person you love most work through exhaustion that should have broken them because stopping was never an option they allowed themselves. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night. He filed for bankruptcy during my senior year. There is no co-signer for my loans. There is no savings account with my name on it. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned. I failed my second term. I lost friendships, lost my job, got sick repeatedly. The kind of year that breaks trajectories. I did not let it break mine. What Jack Terry's story teaches me is that the depth of what you survive does not determine whether you contribute — it determines how much you have to give. He became a geological engineer. Then a medical doctor. Then a psychoanalyst. Then a teacher who spent his later years giving his story to students who needed to hear it. He did not just survive. He gave everything he learned from surviving back to the world. That is exactly what I intend to do. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. My goal is to become a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones — specifically addressing AI diagnostic tools that produce less accurate results for patients with darker complexions. I have already co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that gives first generation pre-medical students honest roadmaps for research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. The adversity I have overcome taught me the same thing Jack Terry's life demonstrates — that what you survive becomes the foundation of what you build. The depression, the grief, the bankruptcy, the year that nearly ended before it started — none of it was wasted. All of it became direction. All of it became fuel. Jack Terry spread knowledge and hope. He understood that surviving was not enough — that the obligation of survival was to give something back that outlasted it. I understand that too. It is why I am going into medicine. It is why I built FirstWhiteCoat. It is why I will spend my career serving the communities that medicine has historically overlooked. I am not just trying to get to college. I am trying to become someone worth the journey it took to get here.

Kindness in Action: The patient had not spoken to anyone in three days. I was eighteen years old, working as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts. She came in for a routine appointment, and when I greeted her in the waiting room, something in her face told me she was carrying more than just an eye condition. I spoke to her in Vietnamese — her first language, the language nobody else in that clinic spoke — and watched something shift in her. The relief of being understood in a place where she had expected to be invisible. I sat with her while she waited. I did not do anything medical. I just stayed. I translated. I asked about her family. I made sure she understood what the doctor was telling her and that she felt comfortable asking questions. When she left, she held my hand and said thank you in a way that meant something larger than the appointment. That moment taught me what kindness actually is. Not grand gestures. Not organized programs. The willingness to notice someone who has been made invisible and say — I see you. I speak your language. You are not alone here. That is the kindness I want to carry into medicine and into every room I enter for the rest of my life. Creating Connection: I founded FirstWhiteCoat because I was tired of first-generation pre-medical students being invisible in the spaces that were supposed to prepare them for medicine. Nobody told me how pre-med actually works. Not how to find research. Not how to cold email a professor. Not what clinical hours count or how to write a personal statement that sounds like a real person wrote it. I figured it out late and by luck. Most students who look like me — first-generation, immigrant, no physician parents — never figure it out at all. Not because they are less capable. Nobody built the connection between where they are and where they need to go. So I built it. FirstWhiteCoat is a social impact platform that gives first-generation pre-medical students honest roadmaps for every stage of the pre-med process. It launched on Instagram this spring, and it is already reaching students who have been navigating this path alone. The content is free. The community is real. The goal is simple — no first-generation pre-med student should have to feel as invisible as I did. I have also spent four years as a varsity volleyball captain doing the same thing on a smaller scale. When a teammate starts to believe the worst version of the story — that the mistakes define us, that the momentum is gone — my job is to interrupt that story. To make her feel seen. To remind her that she belongs on that court. Connection is not complicated. It is showing up for people who have been made to feel like they do not belong and saying — You do. I have been doing that my whole life. I intend to do it for the rest of it.

I do not see my father in the mornings. He leaves before I wake up — Uber first, then Amazon, then whatever the night asks of him. He came to this country from Vietnam with nothing and built something in hours when most people are asleep. I grew up understanding that love in my family does not announce itself. It is a door closing quietly at 4 am. It is a man who never stopped so his daughter could one day start. I came to the United States at eight years old, speaking only Vietnamese. My senior year of high school was the hardest year of my life. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned. I lost friendships, lost my job, and got sick repeatedly. And then my father filed for bankruptcy. College stopped being a plan and became a question mark overnight. I have no co-signer for loans. There is no savings account with my name on it. Without scholarships, I cannot attend college. That is not an exaggeration. That is the mathematics of my situation. I did not step back. I moved faster. I completed a clinical internship at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment, including OCT scanners, fundus cameras, Auto-K keratometers, and automated visual field testing systems. That experience changed everything I thought I understood about what STEM actually is. STEM is not equations on a whiteboard. It is the technology that catches disease before it becomes catastrophic. It is the algorithm that reads a scan and flags an anomaly that a physician might have missed. And in that clinic, I encountered something I could not unfocus on once I saw it — the diagnostic tools we use in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions, patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around, the tools were measurably less accurate. That is not a minor technical flaw. It is a systemic failure producing worse outcomes for the patients who are already the most underserved. And it is a STEM problem that requires biology, data science, and computational research to fix. That observation became a direction. I am pursuing Biology at San Diego State University this fall with a Data Science minor specifically because I want to work at the intersection of machine learning and clinical medicine — using computational methods to make diagnostic tools more accurate and more equitable across all skin tones. I want to become a dermatologist and a researcher. The physician treats the patient in the room. The researcher changes what happens to every patient who comes after. I also volunteered in Surgical Services at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where I watched engineering systems and clinical teams work together in real time. STEM is not abstract knowledge. It is an applied infrastructure that determines whether people live or die. As a Vietnamese-American woman pursuing STEM, I am aware of what my presence in these spaces represents. In diagnostic research environments, in medical schools, in the dermatology specialty that remains one of the least diverse in medicine, women who look like me are rare. I do not experience that as discouragement. I experience it as information about where the work needs to be done and who needs to be there to do it. I have also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform giving first-generation pre-medical students honest roadmaps for research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because the gap between a first-generation student and a student with physician parents is not a gap in intelligence or capability. It is a gap in access to information. An entrepreneur can close that gap. So I am closing it. Balancing all of this during a year of financial collapse, grief, illness, and depression required something I did not know I had until I needed it. My father modeled it every night without naming it. You do not wait for conditions to improve. You work inside the conditions you have, and you do not stop. Eric Larson was the father of two daughters. He spent his life making sure women who looked like his girls had a place in science and engineering — not as guests, but as builders. I am the daughter of a man who drives through the night. I am the granddaughter and stepdaughter of men who died of cancer before medicine could do enough for them. I am a Vietnamese-American woman entering a STEM field where people who look like me are still rare enough to be remarkable. I am not remarkable because I overcame hardship. I am remarkable because I refused to let hardship be the ceiling. Without scholarship support, I cannot attend college. My father cannot co-sign a loan. There is no savings account. Every dollar I borrow is a dollar I repay with interest during a residency that pays $60,000 a year while I carry the debt of an education that costs ten times that. I understand the mathematics of this better than most eighteen-year-olds should have to. This scholarship does not just help me start. It changes the entire financial trajectory of what I can build — as a physician, as a researcher, as someone who will spend her career making sure the tools we use in medicine work for everyone they are supposed to serve. Eric Larson believed women belong in science. My father believes I belong everywhere. This scholarship is how those two beliefs become a life. My father works endless nights. I will work endless days. For him. For the patients. For the girls who come after me, who need to see that this path exists. I am here to prove that it all is possible.

"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Marcus Aurelius did not write the Meditations to be published. He wrote them for himself — private notes from a man who held the most powerful position in the ancient world and still woke up every morning uncertain whether he was living rightly. That context matters when reading this passage because it strips away the possibility that these words were performed. They were not written to inspire anyone. They were written by someone who genuinely needed to believe them to keep going. The surface reading of this passage is straightforward — you cannot control external circumstances, only your response to them, and obstacles can become sources of forward motion rather than barriers to it. But the underlying meaning is more precise and more demanding than that summary suggests. The first sentence — you have power over your mind, not outside events — is not a comfort. It is a transfer of responsibility. Marcus Aurelius is not saying that outside events do not matter. He is saying that the only domain you genuinely own is your interior one and that recognizing this is not resignation but liberation. The student who reads this as passive acceptance has misread it. The student who reads this as radical accountability has understood it. You cannot change what the world does to you. You can change everything about what you do with it. The second sentence — the impediment to action advances action — is the most counterintuitive claim in the passage and the one most worth sitting with. The conventional understanding of obstacles is that they slow or stop progress. Marcus Aurelius inverts this entirely. He argues that the obstacle is not separate from the path — it is the path. Resistance is not a detour from development. It is the mechanism of development. A person who has never been impeded has never been tested and a person who has never been tested does not yet know what they are made of. This is not motivational rhetoric. It is a precise description of how character is actually formed. Strength does not accumulate during easy periods. It accumulates during resistance. The impediment does not merely reveal what is already there — it creates what was not there before. That is the distinction between a surface reading of this passage and a close one. A surface reader hears encouragement. A close reader hears a description of a mechanism — the mechanism by which difficulty transforms into capacity. The final sentence — what stands in the way becomes the way — is the synthesis of the first two. Once you accept that your domain is internal and that resistance is generative the logical conclusion is that the obstacle you face is not incidental to your journey. It is essential to it. Remove the obstacle and you remove the development it was producing. The thing blocking you is the thing building you. I have read this passage as someone who walked to school until junior year, who worked through a senior year that included grief, bankruptcy, depression, and failure, who sat through violin concerts alone and got rides to tournaments from other parents' families and built every opportunity from scratch because there was no one to hand them to me. I did not choose those obstacles. But I recognize in Marcus Aurelius's formulation something that my life has already taught me through experience — that the impediments did not delay the person I am becoming. They are the reason she exists. The underlying meaning of this passage is not that hardship is acceptable. It is that hardship is necessary. Not in a way that excuses the systems that create unnecessary suffering — Marcus Aurelius would have agreed that justice matters — but in the specific sense that the interior development required to become someone of genuine character does not happen without resistance. The mind that has never been tested against difficulty is not stronger for having been spared. It is simply untested. Close reading requires the reader to bring their own understanding of the world to the text — not to impose meaning but to recognize what the writer was reaching toward and complete the thought with the precision the writer intended. Marcus Aurelius was reaching toward a truth that his position as emperor made especially urgent. He had total external power, and he knew that external power was not the same as internal strength. He was trying to remind himself every morning that the only strength worth having was the kind that obstacles produce. That reminder is as urgent now as it was in the second century. Possibly more so.

Faith in my family is not something you talk about. It is something you live. I am Roman Catholic. I grew up attending St. Christine's Parish in Marshfield, Massachusetts — showing up on Sundays with my father, even on the weeks when showing up was the hardest thing either of us had to do. There were weeks like that. Weeks when my stepfather was sick in Vietnam and my father was exhausted beyond what rest could fix, and I was carrying more than a teenager should have to carry. We went anyway. Not because we had answers. Because faith is not about having answers. It is about showing up in the absence of them. That practice shaped how I approach everything — including my education. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student graduating from Marshfield High School this spring. My father raised me alone in a country that was not designed for us. He drives for Uber and Amazon through the night so I can sleep in a home he pays for with hours I will never fully count. I have worked since I was sixteen, walked to school until junior year, sat through violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience, and navigated every application, every opportunity, and every obstacle without a roadmap because no one in my family had walked this path before. Faith taught me that the path not yet visible is still walkable. That you take the next step before you can see the one after it. That integrity means doing the right thing even when the outcome is uncertain — especially then. My academic goals are built on that foundation. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology on a pre-medical track with the goal of becoming a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable for underserved communities. I want to serve immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, people who navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language. That goal did not come from a career assessment. It came from a life spent on the margins of systems that were not designed for people like me and a faith that told me the right response was not resentment but service. Patricia Lindsey Jackson and Eva Mae Jackson lived as stewards — giving back, uplifting others, leading with integrity. That is the model I am trying to follow. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that provides first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because stewardship means using what you have been given to make the path easier for the person behind you. Beyond faith, my father has pushed me toward higher education more than anyone or anything else. Not through words — we do not have those conversations — but through presence. Through the example of a man who works endless nights so his daughter can have mornings that matter. Every time I wanted to stop, I thought about what stopping would cost him. I kept going. Faith and my father are not separate things in my life. They are the same lesson taught in different languages. Show up. Do the work. Trust that it leads somewhere, even when you cannot see where. Leave things better than you found them. That is how I was raised. That is how I intend to live. Instagram — @firstwhitecoat

My father and I do not say I love you. It is not that the feeling is not there. It is in our family that love does not travel through words. It travels through action — through a door closing quietly at 4 am, through a man who drives through the night so his daughter can sleep, through sixteen years of showing up without being asked and sacrificing without being acknowledged, and working without guarantee that it would ever be enough. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old. My parents divorced, and from that point forward, it was just me, my sister, and him — a Vietnamese immigrant father and his daughters navigating a country that was not built for us. We did not have the language for everything we felt. We still do not. What we have instead is presence. The knowledge that the other person is there, working, trying, refusing to stop. That relationship taught me everything I know about human connection. It taught me that connection is not always verbal. Some of the most important relationships in my life have been built almost entirely through action — through showing up, through consistency, through the quiet accumulation of moments that say I see you even when nothing is ever said out loud. My father never attended my violin concerts. He was working. But he paid for the instrument. He made sure I could practice. He built the conditions for something he would never get to witness, and he did it without resentment because that is what love looks like when words are not available. That understanding changed how I build connections with everyone in my life. I stopped waiting for people to say the right thing and started watching what they did. I learned to read presence as love and absence as circumstance rather than abandonment. I learned that the people who show up for you in the unglamorous moments — not the concerts but the ordinary Tuesdays, not the celebrations but the failures — are the ones whose connection actually holds. It also shaped who I want to be as a physician. I am going into medicine because I want to serve communities that have been overlooked — immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, people navigating a healthcare system that does not speak their language. And I understand now that the most important thing I will ever offer those patients is not my clinical knowledge. It is my presence. The willingness to stay in the room. To ask the question nobody else asked. To make someone feel seen in a system that has made them invisible. My father taught me that without ever saying it. He taught me by being the only person in the room for me, year after year, in a country that gave us very little to work with. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students. At its core, it is not really about pre-med strategy. It is about connection — about making sure students who are figuring everything out alone know that someone else has been where they are and wants to help. My father could not give me a roadmap. He gave me something better. He gave me the belief that showing up is enough to change someone's life. I have seen it work. He showed me every single day. The relationship that shaped me most is with a man who drives through the night and says nothing about it. I learned from him that the most powerful human connections are not the loudest ones. They are the ones that hold.

Education did not give me direction. It gave me language for a direction I already had. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old, speaking only Vietnamese. My father raised me alone — driving for Uber and Amazon through the night, working hours most people are asleep through, keeping us housed and fed without complaint and without help. I grew up understanding that opportunity is not given. It is built, carefully, from whatever materials you have, in whatever time you can find between the other things that are trying to stop you. I did not know I wanted to be a physician until I stood in a clinic at seventeen and understood what it felt like to actually help someone. I was a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment. I saw patients independently by mid-summer. In that clinic, I encountered something that changed my understanding of what education is actually for. The AI-assisted diagnostic tools we were using were trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools were measurably less accurate. That is not a minor technical imperfection. It is a systemic failure embedded in the infrastructure of modern medicine. And understanding it required exactly the kind of education I was pursuing — biology, data science, research methodology, the ability to ask why and then figure out how to fix it. Education gave me the tools to see that problem clearly. Now I intend to use education to solve it. The challenges I have overcome are not one thing. They are cumulative. My senior year asked more of me than I knew how to give. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned. My father filed for bankruptcy. I failed my second term. I lost friendships, lost my job, and got sick repeatedly. The kind of year that breaks trajectories. I did not let it break mine. I came back this term — stronger grades, clearer purpose, unbroken direction. I also walked to school until junior year. I worked sixteen to twenty hours a week throughout high school to contribute to household expenses. I sat through violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience. I got rides to volleyball tournaments from other parents. I found my own internships and applied for my own opportunities because there was no one at home who knew how to help me find them. I learned to be self-motivated not as a personality trait but as a survival strategy. When the path does not exist, you build it. That is what my father taught me by example every single night. This fall, I will be the first in my family to attend college at San Diego State University. I am studying Biology with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. My goal is to become a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones — using machine learning to close the gap between what AI can do and what it actually does for patients who look like me. I have also co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that provides first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because the gap between a first-generation student and a student with physician parents is not a gap in intelligence or capability. It is a gap in access to information. Education gave me access. FirstWhiteCoat gives that access to everyone who comes after me. The scholarship description says candidates must believe that who they are becoming matters just as much as where they are going. I believe that completely. I am not just building toward a career. I am building toward a version of myself that is worthy of what my father sacrificed to give me the chance to become. A physician who serves the communities that medicine has historically overlooked. A researcher who builds tools that work for everyone. A woman who walked to school alone and figured it out, and then turned around to make sure the next person had a map. Education did not save me. It gave me the tools to save myself. That is what I intend to give to every patient and every student I touch for the rest of my life.

I did not choose healthcare. Healthcare chose me through loss, through a clinic, and through a problem I could not stop thinking about once I saw it. Two people I loved died of cancer. My grandfather died a year after I came to America — I was eight years old and too far away to be there. My stepfather died in Vietnam during my senior year of high school while I sat in Massachusetts, grieving across an ocean. Both times cancer. Both times, the distance. Both times, nothing I could do. That helplessness is the reason I am going into medicine. Not in the abstract way people say they want to help others. In the specific way that comes from having stood on the wrong side of loss and decided never to feel that powerless again. The summer before college, I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment, including OCT scanners, fundus cameras, and automated visual field testing systems. I saw patients independently by mid-summer. That experience confirmed what I had suspected — that I was built for this work. The clinical environment felt like somewhere I was supposed to be. It also showed me a problem I could not unfocus on. The diagnostic tools we use in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools produce measurably less accurate results. That is not a minor flaw. It is a systemic failure embedded in modern healthcare that produces worse outcomes for the patients who are already most underserved. And it is the problem I intend to spend my career solving. I am pursuing Biology at San Diego State University this fall with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. My goal is to become a dermatologist and researcher who uses computational methods to make diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones. The physician I want to be treats the patient in the room. The researcher I want to be changes what happens to every patient who comes after. As a woman in healthcare, I am aware that my presence in certain spaces — dermatology research, computational medicine, specialty practice ownership — is still uncommon enough to be notable. I do not experience that as a barrier. I experience it as information about where the work needs to be done and who needs to be there to do it. Women bring something to healthcare that is not replaceable — the willingness to ask the question nobody else asked, to stay in the room when staying is uncomfortable, to see the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms. I have also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform giving first-generation pre-medical students honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. I intend to spend my career doing the same thing in medicine — building what is missing for the people who need it most. Healthcare chose me. I am choosing it back with everything I have.

Depression does not announce itself. It arrives quietly, disguised as exhaustion, disguised as not caring anymore, disguised as the inability to explain to anyone why getting out of bed feels like a decision that requires more than you have. I was diagnosed with depression during my senior year of high school. From the outside, my life looked like forward motion — I had been accepted to college, I had clinical experience, I had built things I was proud of. From the inside, I was barely holding on. My stepfather had died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts. I lost friendships. I lost my job. I failed my second term. And underneath all of it, something in me went quiet in a way that frightened me. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way depression works. I did not tell anyone for a long time. In my family — Vietnamese immigrant, single father, no room for anything that cannot be solved by working harder — mental health is not something you name out loud. You carry it. You keep going. You do not burden the people around you with what is happening inside you because they are already carrying too much. I had watched my father work through exhaustion that should have broken him without ever asking for help. I had absorbed that lesson completely. So I suffered quietly and called it strength. What broke the silence was a teacher. Mr. Raymond had taught me sophomore year and was teaching me again during the worst year of my life. When my grades fell and I became inconsistent and I was visibly not okay he did not look away. He pushed. He checked in. He told me what he saw in me when I could not see it myself. He did not lower his expectations. He held them steady and trusted that I could find my way back. I did find my way back. I am doing better this term. That sentence is small and it contains everything. Elijah's Helping Hand Scholarship honors a student who did not make it back. That reality sits with me. Depression lies. It tells you that the weight is permanent, that the quiet will not lift, that the people around you would be unburdened without you. I know those thoughts. I know what it means to be inside them and unable to see past them. I also know — because of Mr. Raymond, because of one person who refused to let me disappear — that the lies can be interrupted. I am going into medicine because I want to be the person who interrupts them. I want to be the physician who asks the question nobody asked me until it was almost too late. Who stays in the room. Who makes it safe to say the thing that has never felt safe to say. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students. Mental health support is one of the pillars I am building into it because the silence that nearly broke me is breaking other students, too, and they deserve someone who understands it from the inside. I understand it from the inside. I am still here. I intend to use that.

I grew up understanding that in my family, there was one person, and that person was my father. My parents divorced when I was young. From that point forward it was just the two of us — a Vietnamese immigrant father and his daughter in a country that was not built for either of us. He drove for Uber and Amazon through the night so I could sleep in a home he paid for with hours I will never fully count. There was no second income. No backup plan. No one to call when something went wrong. Just my father, working, and me, watching him work, learning what determination looks like when it has no choice but to show up. That upbringing made me independent in ways I did not fully appreciate until I looked back. I walked to school until junior year. I got rides to volleyball tournaments from other parents. I sat through violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience. I worked sixteen to twenty hours a week throughout high school to contribute to household expenses. I found my own internships, applied for my own scholarships, navigated college applications without anyone at home who had done it before. Everything I built I built myself because there was no one else to build it and I had watched my father do exactly that my entire life. The realization that gave me a new understanding of myself and others came the summer before college in a clinical internship at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts. I was the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment — OCT scanners, fundus cameras, automated visual field testing systems. I saw patients independently by mid-summer at seventeen. I was proud of that. I thought I understood what I was doing and why it mattered. Then I looked more closely at the technology and realized something I could not unfocus on once I saw it. The diagnostic tools we use in medicine — the AI assisted systems designed to detect disease — were trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions, patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around, the tools were measurably less accurate. That is not a minor technical flaw. It is a systemic failure embedded in the infrastructure of modern medicine that produces worse outcomes for the people who are already most underserved. That realization changed my understanding of myself completely. I had spent my entire life being told implicitly that systems were neutral — that if you worked hard enough and did everything right the system would work for you. In that clinic I understood for the first time that systems are built by people and they reflect the priorities of whoever built them. And that the most important thing I could do with my life was become one of the people who builds them differently. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology with a Data Science minor on a pre-medical track. I want to become a dermatologist and researcher who makes diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones. My father raised me alone and taught me that one person working hard enough can build something from nothing. I intend to prove him right.

Mental health almost ended my senior year. Not in a dramatic way that anyone could see from the outside. In the quiet way that depression works — slowly, invisibly, until the weight of it makes getting out of bed feel like a decision that requires more than you have. I was diagnosed with depression during the hardest year of my life. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts. I lost friendships. I lost my job. I failed my second term. And underneath all of it something in me went quiet in a way that scared me. I kept going because stopping was not something I knew how to do — my father had modeled relentlessness my entire life and I had absorbed it completely. But I was not okay and I did not know how to say it. Mental health is important to me as a student because I lived what happens when it goes unaddressed. The silence is not neutral. It has consequences — failed grades, fractured relationships, a self that slowly becomes unrecognizable. I learned that the hard way. I also learned that recovery is possible when one person decides to show up. My English teacher Mr. Raymond refused to look away during my worst semester. He pushed when I wanted to disappear. He believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself. That experience changed how I understand mental health support — it is not always clinical intervention. Sometimes it is just someone who stays. I advocate for mental health in my community through the social media platform I have built around mental health awareness and anti-bullying since 2022. I started it because I was experiencing things I did not have language for and I suspected other students were too. I created content that named those experiences honestly — the burnout, the isolation, the specific weight of being a first-generation immigrant student who is expected to hold everything together while quietly falling apart. The response I received from peers confirmed what I suspected. Nobody was talking about it. Everybody needed someone to. I have also co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students. Mental health support is one of the pillars I am building into it — because the pressures that first-generation students face are distinct and the resources available to them are disproportionately limited. Students who are working twenty hours a week, grieving across oceans, navigating bankruptcy and loss and depression simultaneously while trying to maintain a GPA that will get them into medical school — those students need more than a campus counseling center with a six-week waitlist. They need community. They need people who understand. They need someone to tell them that struggling does not mean failing. Mental health matters to me because I have been on both sides of the silence. I know what it costs to carry everything alone. I know what it means to have someone refuse to let you disappear. I want to spend my career and my advocacy making sure more people experience the second thing and fewer people are trapped in the first.

My father has never read my essays. His English is not strong enough, and he works too many hours to sit down with something that long. But everything I have ever written has been for him. He came to the United States from Vietnam with nothing. My parents divorced when I was young, and from that point forward, it was just the two of us — a Vietnamese immigrant father and his daughter, navigating a country that was not built for either of us, figuring it out as we went. He drove for Uber and Amazon through the night so I could sleep in a home he paid for with hours I will never fully count. He never complained. He never asked for recognition. He just drove. I grew up without a roadmap. There was no one to guide me to college, no one who knew what the SAT was, no one who could explain the difference between a subsidized and an unsubsidized loan. What my father gave me instead was something harder to teach and more valuable than any of that. He showed me what it looks like to keep going when keeping going is the only option available. To work without a guarantee. To sacrifice without resentment. To build something from nothing and call it enough because it has to be. That is the support that shaped me. Not guidance. Modeling. Every day, my father showed me what determination looked like in practice, and I took notes. I found my own internships. I walked to school until junior year. I sat through violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience. I got rides to volleyball tournaments from other parents. I worked sixteen to twenty hours a week throughout high school to contribute to our household. I applied for scholarships, found clinical opportunities, co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students — all of it self-initiated, all of it built on the foundation my father laid by refusing to stop. This fall, I will be the first in my family to attend college at San Diego State University. I am studying Biology on a pre-medical track to become a dermatologist who serves underserved communities. My father will not fully understand what that means. But he will understand that his daughter made it. That the nights were worth it. That the sacrifice landed somewhere. I honor him by not wasting a single opportunity. By treating my education with the same seriousness he treats every shift. By building something that outlasts both of us — a career that serves people who look like us, research that closes gaps that hurt people like us, and a platform that makes sure the students who come after me do not have to figure it all out alone the way I did. The scholarship founder lost their mother at ten and their father became their rock. I lost my family's wholeness when my parents divorced and my father became mine. Different circumstances. The same truth — that one parent who refuses to give up can be enough. My father was enough. I intend to spend my life being worthy of that.

I understand student debt the way most eighteen-year-olds do not — not as an abstract concept but as a mathematical reality I have been calculating since the day I got into college. My father filed for bankruptcy during my senior year. There is no co-signer for my loans. There is no savings account with my name on it. Every dollar I borrow is a dollar I will repay with interest during a medical residency that pays $60,000 a year while I carry the debt of an education that costs ten times that. I did not learn this from a financial literacy class. I learned it from watching my father navigate a system that was not designed for someone who learned English as an adult and never had access to proper financial education. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student starting at San Diego State University this fall, studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I have been working part-time as Chief of Staff at a multimillion-dollar technology startup since October 2025. I am also managing a diagnosed depressive disorder that returned acutely during my senior year following the death of my stepfather and a cascade of losses that arrived simultaneously. I kept working. I kept applying. I kept building because stopping was not an option I could afford. Here is how I am actively addressing my student debt. First — scholarships. I have submitted over 25 scholarship applications in the past month alone. I am treating scholarship applications like a part-time job because they are. Every dollar I win is a dollar I do not borrow. Every essay I write is an investment in a debt-free future that I cannot afford to leave to chance. Second — federal aid maximization. With an SAI of negative 1500, I qualify for the maximum Pell Grant of $7,395 per year. My father's bankruptcy and inability to obtain a Parent PLUS Loan qualify me for additional unsubsidized federal loans beyond the standard limit. I have researched every federal aid mechanism available to students in my exact situation, and I am using all of them. Third — income-driven repayment planning. I understand that the SAVE repayment plan caps payments at 5% of discretionary income for undergraduate loans. I am building my financial plan around the reality of a medical residency salary, not around wishful thinking about attending physician income. Every borrowing decision I make now accounts for what repayment will look like in ten years. Fourth — building income-generating assets now. FirstWhiteCoat — the social impact platform I co-founded for first-generation pre-medical students — has the potential to generate revenue through partnerships and sponsorships as it grows. I am building something that serves a community and creates financial sustainability simultaneously. I am not waiting until I graduate to think about debt. I am thinking about it now, planning around it now, and working to minimize it now — because I watched what happens when someone navigates a financial system without the information they need. I am making sure that does not happen to me.

Mental health in my family was never discussed. Not because we did not struggle. Because we struggled too hard to have time to name it. My father is a Vietnamese immigrant who drives for Uber and Amazon through the night. He raised me alone in a country whose language he was still learning, without a support system, without anyone to call when things got hard, without the luxury of rest. I watched him work through exhaustion that should have broken him. I watched him come home at hours when the rest of the world was asleep and leave again before I woke up. He never complained. He never asked for help. In Vietnamese immigrant culture, you do not burden others with what you are carrying. You carry it alone, and you keep going. I learned that lesson too well. Throughout high school, I carried everything alone. The pressure of succeeding. The weight of knowing that every opportunity I did not seize was an opportunity my father's sacrifice could not recover. The isolation of navigating systems — academic, financial, social — that nobody at home could help me understand. I worked sixteen to twenty hours a week alongside my studies. I walked to school until junior year. I sat through violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience. I got rides to volleyball tournaments from other parents because there was no one to take me. I did not call any of that a mental health struggle. I called it life. Then my senior year arrived, and everything I had been carrying became too heavy to pretend was not there. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned in a way I had not felt since middle school. I failed my second term. I lost friendships. I lost my job. I got sick repeatedly. And for the first time in my life, I had to admit that I was not okay — not because I was weak but because I was human and I had been running on empty for years without anyone noticing because I had been so good at hiding it. The hardest part was not the depression itself. It was the silence around it. My father and I do not talk about these things. He is exhausted and isolated and burning through himself to keep us alive, and I am his daughter, who is supposed to be okay because she is the reason he is doing all of this. Telling him I was struggling felt like telling him his sacrifice was not enough. So I did not tell him. And he did not tell me how hard it was for him either. We just kept going in parallel — both struggling, both silent, both too afraid of burdening the other to ask for help. What changed was a teacher who refused to look away. Mr. Raymond had taught me in my sophomore year and was teaching me again during the worst year of my life. He pushed when I wanted to disappear. He believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself. He was the first person who made me feel like my struggle did not disqualify me — that I was still worth investing in even when I was falling apart. That experience reshaped everything I believe about mental health. It taught me that the stigma around struggle does not just hurt individuals. It isolates them from the people who could help. My father and I were both drowning in the same house, and we could not reach each other because we had both been taught that drowning is something you do quietly. I am going into medicine because I want to be the person who interrupts that silence. Not just for patients with diagnosed conditions but for the immigrant fathers who are too exhausted to ask for help and the daughters who are too afraid to admit they are burning out. I want to be the physician who asks the question. Who stays in the room. Who makes it safe to say the thing that has never been safe to say. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students. Mental health support is one of the pillars I am building into it — because the silence that nearly broke me is breaking other students too, and they deserve someone who understands it from the inside. The Ethel Hayes scholarship exists because one person's silence became a tragedy that echoed for decades. I know what silence costs. I watched it cost my father his rest and cost me my second term and cost both of us the conversations we should have been having for years. I am done being silent about it. This essay is proof.

I came to the United States at eight years old with my father and very little else. I left behind a language I was fluent in, a country I had only just begun to understand, and a mother I would not see for years. What I arrived with was a father who believed that a harder life in America was still a better life than the one we had — and the quiet, unspoken agreement between us that his sacrifice would not be wasted. I did not choose to immigrate. I was carried here by someone else's courage. But every choice I have made since then has been my own. Learning English meant more than learning words. It meant learning how to exist in a system that did not know I was there. How to advocate for myself in classrooms where I was the only student who had never seen snow. How to navigate college applications, financial aid, healthcare, and opportunity without anyone at home who has done it before. My father drove for Uber and Amazon. He did not know what the SAT was. Everything I figured out, I figured out alone or not at all. That experience did not make me bitter. It made me precise. I learned to use every resource available to me with urgency because I understood early that access is not guaranteed and windows close. I completed a clinical internship at seventeen as the youngest intern a medical practice had ever accepted. I worked sixteen hours a week throughout high school to contribute to household expenses. I founded a club, captained a sport, played first violin for ten years, and co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that gives first generation pre-medical students the roadmaps nobody gave me. My career aspiration is medicine. Specifically, dermatology and computational health research. I want to become a physician who serves immigrant and underserved communities — patients who navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language, whose skin tones are underrepresented in diagnostic training data, whose cultural context is invisible to their providers. I have already seen what happens when medicine fails people who look like my family. I watched two people I loved die of cancer from the wrong side of the world. I am going into medicine because I refuse to spend the rest of my life feeling powerless. This summer, I will volunteer at Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City — one of Vietnam's leading public hospitals — where I will shadow physicians and communicate directly with patients in Vietnamese. This fall, I will start at San Diego State University as the first in my family to attend college. I will study Biology with a Data Science minor and build toward medical school with the same urgency I have brought to everything else. The immigrant experience taught me that belonging is not given. It is built. I have been building mine since I was eight years old and I am not finished yet.

The score was not the problem. The mistakes were. I have played volleyball since I was young enough to understand what a serve was. By the time I became captain and libero of my club team, I had learned something that took years to figure out — the most dangerous moment in a match is not when the other team is better than you. It is when your own team starts believing they are worse than they are. We were making mistakes. The kind that compounds. One missed serve becomes a missed dig becomes a missed set becomes a point and then another point, and then you look around the court, and you can see it happening in real time — the shoulders dropping, the eyes going distant, the belief draining out of people who were perfectly capable ten minutes ago. As the libero, I am already in a unique position. I play defense. I do not spike. I do not serve in most rotations. My entire job is to keep the ball alive — to get under things that should not be saveable and save them anyway. But as captain, my job was something more than that. It was to be the person who did not drop her shoulders. Who did not let her eyes go distant. Who stayed loud and present and convinced even when conviction was the hardest thing to maintain. I called a timeout. Not because the coach told me to. Because I looked at my teammates and I saw people who needed someone to interrupt the story they were telling themselves. The story that said the mistakes defined us. That the momentum was gone. That we had already lost. I did not give a speech. I am not that kind of captain. I just looked at each of them and said what I actually believed — that mistakes are not the problem, that quitting on each other is the only thing that actually loses a match, and that I needed them to trust me and trust themselves for the next rotation. We came back. Not because of anything dramatic. Because a group of people who had started to give up remembered that they did not have to. That is all a captain can ever really do — remind people of what they already have when they have temporarily forgotten it. That moment taught me something I have carried into every other area of my life. Helping someone in need is not always about resources or expertise or having the right answer. Sometimes it is about presence. About being the person who stays steady when everything else is shaking. About refusing to let the people around you believe the worst version of the story. I am going into medicine because I want to spend my life being that person for patients who need it. The clinical environments I have already worked in have confirmed what volleyball taught me — that the most powerful thing you can offer someone who is struggling is the unshakeable belief that they are not finished yet. I learned that on a volleyball court. I intend to practice it for the rest of my life.

My first language is Vietnamese. I learned English by watching other children and figuring out which sounds matched which meanings. I was eight years old, newly arrived in the United States, and the language I had spoken my entire life suddenly became invisible in every room I entered. That invisibility taught me something important. Language is not just communication. It belongs. When you cannot speak the language of the room you are in, you are present but not fully there. You watch more than you speak. You learn to read people instead of words. You develop a kind of attention that monolingual speakers rarely need — a constant awareness of what is being said beneath what is being said. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student graduating from Marshfield High School this spring. I am also conversational in Spanish, making me trilingual. This fall I will be the first in my family to attend college at San Diego State University, where I will study Biology on a pre-medical track to become a dermatologist who serves underserved communities. The challenges of growing up bilingual were real and sometimes painful. I became my family's translator before I fully understood either language. I sat in parent-teacher conferences as a child, translating concepts I barely understood myself, carrying the weight of my father's questions and the teacher's answers simultaneously. I code-switched constantly — Vietnamese at home, English everywhere else — and for years felt like I fully belonged in neither world. There is a specific loneliness in being the bridge between two cultures that do not fully see each other. But the benefits have shaped everything I am becoming. When I volunteered at Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City this summer I walked into patient rooms and spoke directly to people in their first language without an interpreter. I watched the relief on their faces — the visible exhale of being understood by someone in a clinical setting. That moment confirmed something I had suspected for years. Vietnamese fluency is not just a personal attribute. In medicine it is a clinical tool. It is the difference between a patient who withholds information because they cannot find the words and a patient who tells their physician everything. After all, the physician already speaks their language. I intend to practice dermatology in communities where Vietnamese, Spanish, and English intersect — where patients navigate healthcare systems in their second or third language and often receive worse care as a result. My multilingualism is not incidental to my career goals. It is central to them. After college, I will attend medical school, complete a dermatology residency, and open a practice that serves patients across all skin tones and all languages. I have also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform providing first-generation pre-medical students with the roadmaps nobody gave us. Language access is one of the pillars I am building into that platform because first-generation students whose first language is not English face barriers that extend far beyond vocabulary. Being multilingual taught me that the world is larger and more layered than any single language can contain. I plan to spend my career proving that medicine works better when the physician speaks the patient's language — literally and in every other way that matters.

I did not know the word for what I was experiencing. I just knew that one day getting out of bed felt possible, and the next day it did not. I was diagnosed with depression during a year that asked more of me than I knew how to give. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. I lost friendships. I lost my job. I got sick repeatedly. And underneath all of it, something in me went quiet in a way that scared me. I failed my second term. Not because I stopped caring. Because I was drowning and did not know how to say it out loud. Mental health is not something my family talks about. In Vietnamese immigrant households, struggle is something you carry privately. You do not burden others with what is happening inside you. You work. You keep going. You do not name the thing that is pulling you under because naming it makes it real. Depression made it real anyway. What changed was a teacher who refused to look away. Mr. Raymond had taught me in my sophomore year and was teaching me again during the hardest year of my life. When my grades fell, and my presence became inconsistent, and I was visibly not okay, he did not lower his expectations or write me off. He pushed. He checked in. He told me what he saw in me when I could not see it myself. That experience taught me something about mental health that no diagnosis ever could — that recovery is not something you do alone. It is something that becomes possible when one person decides you are worth believing in. I am doing better this term. That sentence contains more than it sounds like. It means I came back. It means that the story depression was telling me about who I was and what I was capable of turned out to be wrong. It means that a first-generation Vietnamese-American girl who walked to school until junior year, worked sixteen hours a week, sat through violin concerts with no one she knew in the audience, and grieved a stepfather from across an ocean — that girl got back up. My mental health journey shaped my career aspirations in ways I am still discovering. I want to become a physician who serves underserved communities — immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, people navigating a healthcare system that does not speak their language. But I also want to be a physician who understands what it means to carry something invisible. Who does not look away when a patient is visibly not okay. Who asks the question that nobody in my life thought to ask until Mr. Raymond did. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat for first-generation pre-medical students. Mental health support is one of the pillars I am building into it — because first-generation students carry unique pressures that the system was not designed to address, and silence is not the same as strength. Depression did not make me weaker. It made me more honest. About what I need. About what my patients will need. About what it actually takes to show up for someone who is drowning. I know what it feels like to drown. I also know what it feels like to come back.

My father worked hard his entire life, but I never got to see him. He left before I woke up and came home after I was asleep. I performed in violin concerts with no one I knew in the audience. I got rides to volleyball tournaments from other parents because there was no one to take me. I walked to school until my junior year. Everything I figured out, I figured out alone. That taught me something most people learn much later. Nobody is coming to save you. You save yourself by using every resource around you and refusing to stop. I worked sixteen to twenty hours a week throughout high school while maintaining my grades and pursuing opportunities most students waited to be handed. I found my own internships. I applied for scholarships to support my passion for volleyball. I navigated college applications, financial aid, and pre-medical preparation without a roadmap because no one in my family had walked this path before me. This fall, I'll be attending college at San Diego State University, studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I have already completed a clinical internship, co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that helps first-generation pre-medical students find their way, and secured a hospital internship in Vietnam for this summer. I learned to utilize all the resources the world could offer. Growing up with nothing taught me that resilience is not something you are born with. It is something you build every time you show up for yourself when no one else does. I plan to spend my career showing up for patients who need someone in their corner the same way I needed someone in mine. And give back to my father, an immigrant who fought every day, so that I get a chance to shine one day.

I am the daughter of a man who drives through the night so I can sleep. My father came to the United States from Vietnam with nothing. He works for Uber and Amazon through hours most people never see, keeping us housed and fed without complaint, without recognition, without any guarantee that it would be enough. I grew up watching him pour everything he had into a future he would never get to keep for himself — only pass on. That work ethic is the most important thing he ever gave me. I have tried to honor it every day. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student graduating from Marshfield High School this spring with a 3.62 GPA. I captained my varsity volleyball team to eight regional gold medals. I played first violin in the school orchestra for ten consecutive years. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club in ninth grade. I completed a clinical internship at seventeen as the youngest intern a medical practice had ever accepted, seeing patients independently by mid-summer. I worked as a barista and retail educator throughout high school to contribute to household expenses while maintaining my academics and pursuing every opportunity I could find. My senior year was the hardest year of my life. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts. Depression returned. My father filed for bankruptcy. I got sick repeatedly. I lost people I thought would stay. The kind of year that breaks trajectories. I did not let it break mine. I came back this term — stronger grades, clearer direction, unbroken purpose. This fall, I am starting at San Diego State University, studying Biology on a pre-medical track with the goal of becoming a dermatologist who serves underserved communities and conducts research on making diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones. I have already co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that provides first-generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Kalia Davis had an impeccable work ethic and was a person of excellence in every area of her life. She was an athlete, a straight-A student, a leader, a person her peers could count on. She did not do one thing well — she did everything well because she understood that excellence is not a performance. It is a standard you hold yourself to even when nobody is watching. I recognize that standard. I have been living it since I was eight years old and arrived in a country that did not speak my language, and I decided that was not a reason to stop. This scholarship would directly fund my first year of college expenses — reducing the amount I need to borrow and giving me the financial stability to focus entirely on academics, research, and clinical experience rather than working multiple jobs to survive. Without scholarship support, I cannot attend college. That is the truth of my situation. I intend to honor Kalia's legacy by doing exactly what she did — showing up fully, working relentlessly, and being someone my community can count on.

The movie that changed me was not made in Hollywood. It was made in Vietnam, in the language I grew up speaking, about a relationship I have spent my entire life trying to understand. Bố Già — translated as Dad, I'm Sorry — is a 2021 Vietnamese film about a father and his son. The father is aging, struggling, trying to hold his family together with whatever he has left. The son is caught between love and resentment, between gratitude and the weight of expectations he never asked to carry. The film broke box office records in Vietnam. It broke something in me, too. I watched it thinking about my father. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night so I can sleep in a home he pays for with hours I will never fully count. He came to the United States from Vietnam with nothing. He does not talk about what it costs to get here. He drives. Love in my family does not announce itself. It is a door closing quietly at 4 am. It is a man who sacrifices everything and says nothing about it because saying something would make it a burden, and he refuses to be a burden. Bố Già is about the silence between a father and a child when love is real, but communication fails. It is about how much can go unsaid between two people who would do anything for each other. It is about the specific grief of realizing too late what someone meant to you — and the specific urgency of realizing it just in time. I watched that film and I understood something I had never been able to articulate before. My father and I do not need to say it. We know. But I needed to hear it said out loud — in Vietnamese, by characters who looked like us, in a story that was ours — to finally let myself feel the full weight of what he has given me and what I owe him in return. That film changed how I move through the world. It changed how I approach my education — not as a personal achievement but as a repayment. A promise. Every class I attend, every exam I sit, every clinical hour I log is a direct response to a man who drove through the night so I could have the morning. I am starting college this fall as the first in my family to do so. I am studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I want to become a physician who serves the communities that medicine has historically overlooked — immigrant families, Vietnamese Americans, people who navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language. I chose that path for many reasons. But one of them is a Vietnamese film about a father and a son that reminded me where I came from and who I am doing this for. Bố Già means Dad, I'm Sorry. I am not sorry. I am grateful. And I am going to make it worth it.

I chose Biology because two people I loved died of cancer, and I was too far away, too young, and too powerless to do anything about it. My grandfather died a year after I came to America. I was eight years old, newly arrived in a country whose language I did not speak, and I could not be there. My stepfather died in Vietnam during my senior year of high school while I sat in Massachusetts, grieving across an ocean. Both times, cancer. Both times, distance. Both times, nothing I could do. I am pursuing a Biology degree because I refuse to spend the rest of my life feeling helpless. Biology is the language of why. Why do cells divide incorrectly? Why the immune system fails to catch what it should catch. Why do some bodies respond to treatment and others do not? I want to speak that language fluently enough to change outcomes — for the patients who sit across from me, and for the patients whose outcomes are shaped by the research I intend to do. The summer before college I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry in Quincy, Massachusetts — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment including OCT scanners, fundus cameras, and automated visual field testing systems. I saw patients independently by mid-summer. That experience gave me something I had not expected. It gave me proof. Proof that I could function inside a clinical environment. Proof that the science I was learning had direct, immediate, human consequences. Proof that the future I was building toward was not just a dream but a direction. It also showed me a problem I could not stop thinking about. The diagnostic tools we use in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools produce measurably less accurate results. That is not a minor technical imperfection. It is a systemic failure embedded in the infrastructure of modern medicine. And it is a Biology problem. A data problem. A research problem. The kind of problem that requires exactly the education I am pursuing. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology with a Data Science minor. I want to become a dermatologist and a researcher who uses computational methods to make diagnostic medicine more equitable across all skin tones. The physician I want to be treats the patient in the room. The researcher I want to be changes what happens to every patient who comes after. Julie Adams spent ten years as a math teacher devoted to helping young women get involved in STEM. She understood something that I have learned through experience — that when a woman who looks like you is not in the room, part of you wonders whether you belong there. Julie made sure her students belonged. She devoted her career to that. I am devoting mine to the same idea applied differently — making sure that when a patient who looks like me walks into a clinic, the tools, the research, and the physician are all prepared to serve her fully. My passion for Biology is not academic. It is personal. It is the answer to two funerals I attended from the wrong side of the world. It is what I owe to a father who drives through the night so I can pursue it. It is what I intend to build into something that outlasts me — research that improves outcomes, a practice that serves people who have been overlooked, a career that turns private grief into public good. I am passionate about my degree because Biology is the foundation of the work I was always going to do. I just needed to find the language for it. I found it.

I almost did not make it through this year. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam during my senior year while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned in a way I had not felt since middle school. I failed my second term. Not because I stopped caring. Because I was drowning and I did not know how to ask for a life preserver. Mr. Raymond threw me one anyway. He teaches English. He had me in my sophomore year and again this year, which means he knew who I was before the worst year of my life arrived. He knew what I was capable of before I forgot. And when my grades collapsed, and my presence in class became inconsistent, and I was visibly not okay — he did not look away. He pushed. Not in the way that feels like pressure when you are already underwater. In the way that feels like someone grabbing your arm and refusing to let go. He checked in. He stayed after. He told me what he saw in me when I could not see it myself. He did not lower his expectations because my circumstances were hard. He held them steady and trusted that I could find my way back to them. That trust changed something in me. When a teacher decides a struggling student is worth fighting for it does not just help that student pass a class. It rewrites the story the student is telling herself about who she is and what she is capable of. I was telling myself a story about a girl who was falling apart. Mr. Raymond kept interrupting that story with a different one. A story about a student he had watched grow for two years. A student who had something to say and the ability to say it. A student worth believing in. I am doing much better this term. That is not a small thing. That is the difference between a transcript that ends in failure and one that ends in recovery. It is the difference between arriving at San Diego State University this fall defeated and arriving with proof that I can come back from the hardest things. David Foster transcended the standard curriculum. He opened minds and motivated students in ways that lasted decades. Mr. Raymond did something similar for me — not through a radical teaching technique but through something simpler and rarer. He refused to give up on a student who had temporarily given up on herself. He treated my potential as a fact even when my grades suggested otherwise. He understood that sometimes the most important thing a teacher can do is stay. I am a first-generation Vietnamese-American student who has survived immigration, loss, financial hardship, and a depression that nearly ended my senior year. I am going to college because of my own stubbornness, my father's sacrifice, and the teachers who showed up for me when showing up was hard. Mr. Raymond is one of those teachers. This scholarship honors his kindness.

I am a first-generation student from a low-income immigrant household pursuing a future in healthcare because I have seen how access to early diagnosis and medical guidance changes the direction of a person’s life. Growing up, I understood that navigating healthcare systems without familiarity or financial stability makes prevention harder and treatment slower. That experience shaped my goal of entering a medical career focused on improving access to early detection and patient-centered care. During high school, I began building experience inside clinical environments to understand how healthcare systems function beyond the classroom. I trained as an optometry technician, where I supported patient intake and assisted with diagnostic imaging processes such as OCT scans and autorefractor measurements. Working with this equipment showed me how technology allows providers to identify disease earlier and make informed treatment decisions. It also showed me how important technical accuracy is for protecting patient outcomes. At the same time, I volunteered in hospital surgical services, where I observed how coordinated teams prepare environments that allow procedures to run safely and efficiently. These experiences helped me understand that healthcare is not only about physicians. It is a system built through collaboration between technical staff, clinicians, and support teams working toward the same goal. Seeing that structure confirmed my decision to pursue a career connected to healthcare innovation and patient access. Outside of clinical settings, I balanced multiple jobs while maintaining my academic preparation for college. After my father filed for bankruptcy, continuing my education became financially uncertain. Because of this, I worked as a barista, retail educator, and receptionist while continuing hospital volunteering and technical training. These responsibilities strengthened my time management skills and reinforced how strongly I am committed to continuing my education despite financial barriers. My long-term goal is to become a physician and eventually build a medical practice that improves access to early diagnostic care for communities that face barriers similar to the ones my family experienced. Many families delay care because they are unfamiliar with healthcare systems or concerned about cost. Expanding early screening access and improving communication between providers and patients can change long-term health outcomes. I want my career to focus on closing that gap. As a low-income, first-generation student, scholarships directly determine whether I can continue building the education required to enter healthcare. Support from scholarships like the Robert F. Lawson Scholarship allows students who are committed to service-based careers to remain on the path toward contributing to their communities. My goal is not only to enter healthcare but to strengthen the systems that allow patients to receive earlier, clearer, and more accessible care. Through a career in medicine, I plan to contribute to improving how communities experience healthcare from their first appointment through long-term treatment and prevention.

Calculus is important in the STEM field because it explains how change happens inside real systems. Instead of only measuring results, calculus allows scientists and engineers to understand motion, growth, optimization, and prediction. For students preparing to work in technical environments, it becomes a foundation for understanding how technology actually functions. My interest in calculus comes from working inside clinical diagnostic settings while still in high school. As an optometry technician trainee, I assisted with imaging workflows that relied on optical scans and measurement systems designed to detect early signs of disease. These technologies do not simply capture pictures. They interpret continuous biological signals and convert them into measurable information using mathematical models built from calculus. Seeing how these tools support early detection changed how I understood the role of mathematics in medicine. Calculus is especially important in healthcare technology because modern diagnostic systems depend on interpreting rates of change. Imaging devices, signal-processing systems, and predictive medical software all rely on mathematical modeling to identify patterns before symptoms become visible. Understanding calculus makes it possible to improve these tools rather than only operate them. As someone planning to pursue a STEM degree connected to medical innovation, this distinction matters. Calculus also connects multiple STEM disciplines together. Engineers use derivatives to analyze motion and structural behavior. Computer scientists use optimization methods to improve algorithms and security systems. Biologists use modeling to understand growth and diffusion across populations. Because these fields share a mathematical foundation, calculus allows collaboration across disciplines that would otherwise remain separate. Studying calculus also represents persistence. The subject requires structured thinking, patience, and the ability to approach difficult problems step by step. These are the same skills required in technical medical environments where solutions must be precise and reliable. Preparing for a STEM career means learning how to solve problems that do not have immediate answers, and calculus strengthens that ability. As a first-generation student whose family experienced financial hardship after my father filed for bankruptcy, continuing my STEM education depends heavily on scholarship support. Without scholarships, attending college may not be possible. However, I have already begun building experience inside clinical technical environments because I want to contribute to improving early diagnostic access through medical technology. Calculus is not only a required subject for STEM students. It is the framework that allows future engineers and healthcare innovators to design better systems that improve how people receive care. For me, studying calculus represents preparation to participate in building those systems.

During my senior year of high school, my father filed for bankruptcy. Overnight, college stopped feeling like a plan and started feeling uncertain. As a first-generation student in a working-class immigrant household, I understood that without scholarships, attending college would not be guaranteed. Instead of reducing my goals, I decided to prove that I belonged in a technical healthcare pathway before I ever stepped onto a college campus. I set a target for myself: gain real clinical technical experience while maintaining my grades and continuing to prepare for a STEM degree. To do that, I worked multiple jobs while building experience inside medical environments. I worked as a barista and retail educator to help support myself while volunteering in hospital surgical services and training as an optometry technician. Entering a diagnostic setting as a high school student required learning quickly and performing accurately. I studied imaging workflows outside my scheduled hours and asked technicians to explain how OCT scans and autorefractor measurements supported early disease detection. Over time, I became trusted to assist with patient testing and imaging preparation independently. Learning to operate diagnostic technology before graduating high school became one of the most important achievements of my life. It showed me that technical skill is not limited by access—it is built through persistence. At the same time, I continued volunteering in surgical services at a hospital, where I observed how engineering systems, imaging tools, and coordinated clinical teams work together to protect patient safety. Watching these systems operate strengthened my interest in the intersection between medicine and technology and confirmed my goal of pursuing a STEAM degree connected to healthcare innovation. Balancing these responsibilities during a year of financial instability required planning and discipline. I built structured weekly schedules around work shifts and study blocks so that my academic performance stayed strong while I gained technical experience. Instead of seeing financial hardship as a limitation, I treated it as motivation to move faster toward real-world learning opportunities. Being a first-generation student means there is no roadmap in my family for navigating college or medical careers. Because of that, I began building my own path early. I sought out clinical environments, learned technical equipment, and stayed committed to a future in healthcare even when college funding became uncertain. Today, my goal is to pursue a STEAM degree that prepares me to work at the intersection of medicine and technology, especially in improving early diagnostic access for underserved communities like the one I grew up in. Scholarships like the Mark Caldwell Memorial STEAM Scholarship do more than support tuition. They make it possible for students like me to continue building technical skills that can become lifelong contributions to healthcare and engineering. Without scholarship support, attending college may not be possible. With support, I will continue the work I have already started.

I did not choose STEM because it seemed promising. I chose it because it is the only field that gives me the tools to fix something broken that I can see with my own eyes. The summer before college I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment and cared for patients independently at seventeen. In that clinic I encountered something I could not unfocus on once I saw it. The diagnostic tools we use in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools were measurably less accurate. That is not a minor technical flaw. It is a systemic failure producing worse outcomes for the patients who are already most underserved. That observation is why I am pursuing Biology at San Diego State University with a Data Science minor. I want to work at the intersection of computational methods and clinical medicine — using machine learning to make diagnostic tools more accurate and more equitable across all skin tones. The impact I intend to make is specific. I want to be the researcher who helps close the gap between what AI can do and what it actually does for patients who look like me. But STEM gave me something before it gave me a research direction. It gave me a way to understand the world precisely enough to act on it. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old speaking only Vietnamese. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I have worked since I was sixteen — as a barista, a retail educator — contributing to household expenses while pursuing a 3.62 GPA, captaining my varsity volleyball team to eight regional gold medals, and completing clinical experiences that most students my age never seek out. My senior year was the hardest year of my life. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned. I lost friendships, lost my job, got sick repeatedly. The kind of adversity that breaks trajectories. I did not let it break mine. I kept showing up because I understood that the future I was building was not just for me. It was for my father who never stopped driving, for my grandfather and stepfather who died of cancer before medicine could do enough for them, for the patients who will one day sit across from Dr. Chau Vo and need someone who sees them fully. I have also co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a platform providing first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, and medical school applications. STEM without access is just knowledge sitting behind a locked door. I intend to leave every door I walk through propped open for the person behind me. That is the impact I am building toward. One equation, one dataset, one patient at a time.

I did not wait until after college to start building. This month I co-founded FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact platform providing first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because first generation students are not less capable than students with physician parents. They are less informed. And that gap — between capability and access to information — is something an entrepreneur can close. That is how I understand entrepreneurship. Not as building something for profit. As building something because a gap exists and you are the person who can see it clearly enough to fill it. I see gaps everywhere I look. I see them in medicine — where AI diagnostic tools trained predominantly on lighter skin tones produce measurably less accurate results for patients with darker complexions. I see them in education — where first generation students figure out the pre-medical process late and through luck while their peers absorb it at the dinner table. I see them in healthcare access — where immigrant communities navigate a system that does not speak their language and does not understand their context. My legacy will be built at the intersection of all three. FirstWhiteCoat is the beginning. A free platform that gives first generation pre-medical students what they need to compete on equal footing. I am growing it through Instagram, through content that is honest and specific and written by someone living it in real time. The goal is to expand it into a full resource hub — video guides, mentorship matching, essay workshops, research opportunity databases — everything a student with physician parents gets for free and a student like me has to find on her own. The business I hope to build after medical school is a multi-location dermatology practice serving underserved communities — specifically immigrant and communities of color who are historically overlooked by specialty medicine. Mixed medical and cosmetic dermatology. Physician-owned. Built on a model that uses data science to identify the communities with the greatest need and the least access. I will hire physicians and nurse practitioners who reflect the populations they serve. I will build a practice where a Vietnamese patient can speak to someone in their own language and receive care that actually sees them. I am the daughter of a man who drives through the night so I can sleep. I am a first generation Vietnamese-American who came to this country at eight years old and learned that the path you cannot find you have to build yourself. I shine my light by refusing to keep it to myself. By turning every door that opened for me into a door I prop open for the person behind me. Entrepreneurship is not about having the best idea. It is about having the clearest vision of what is missing and the stubbornness to build it anyway. I have been building my whole life. College is where it accelerates.

I have never waited for someone to hand me a solution to a problem I could see clearly. The first problem I saw clearly was in a clinic. The summer before college I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment and cared for patients independently. In that clinic I encountered something I could not unfocus on once I saw it. The AI-assisted diagnostic tools used in medicine are trained predominantly on lighter skin tones. For patients with darker complexions — patients who looked like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around — the tools were measurably less accurate. That is not a minor technical flaw. It is a systemic failure that produces worse outcomes for the patients who are already most underserved by the healthcare system. I am not yet in a position to fix that problem at scale. But I am building toward it. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall studying Biology with a Data Science minor specifically because I want to work at the intersection of computational methods and clinical medicine — using machine learning to make diagnostic tools more accurate and more equitable across all skin tones. The research direction is defined. The path is being built. The second problem I saw clearly was closer to home. Nobody told me how pre-medical school actually works. Not how to find research. Not how to cold email a professor. Not what clinical hours count or how to write a personal statement that sounds like a real person wrote it. I figured it out late and through luck — and I understood that most first generation students like me never figure it out at all. They have the ability. They do not have the information. So I built the information. I co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative that provides first generation pre-medical students with honest, practical roadmaps for every stage of the pre-med process. Research. Clinical hours. MCAT strategy. Medical school applications. Personal statement guidance. Written by first generation students for first generation students — people who are living it in real time and telling the truth about what it actually takes. The platform launched on Instagram this month and is already growing. The content is free. The goal is access — radical, unconditional access to information that students from privileged backgrounds absorb at the dinner table and students like me have to find on their own or not at all. Both of these projects — the Fitzpatrick AI research direction and FirstWhiteCoat — share the same root. I grew up in a system that was not designed for me. I learned that system well enough to see exactly where it fails people who look like me. And I decided that the right response was not to accept those failures as inevitable but to build something better. That is what trailblazers do. Not because the path is easy. Because the people who need the path cannot afford to wait for someone else to build it.

My father does not talk about what it cost to get here. He just drives. Uber first. Then Amazon. Then whatever the night asks of him. He came from Vietnam with nothing — no connections, no safety net, no roadmap for how to survive in a country whose language he was still learning. What he had was the same thing Chhin Lor had. The absolute refusal to let difficulty be the final word. I came to the United States at eight years old. I did not choose to immigrate — I was carried here by my father's decision that a harder life in America was still a better life than the one we had. I learned English by watching other children and figuring out which sounds matched which meanings. I learned that in America, you do not wait for someone to explain the rules. You watch, you study, you adapt, and then you find a way in. That is what first generation means to me. Not a disadvantage. A different kind of education. The formal education I received at Marshfield High School gave me biology and chemistry and calculus and four years of orchestra and a volleyball team I eventually captained. But the education that shaped who I am happened in the margins. It happened watching my father count what was left after the bills were paid. It happened when my stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam during my senior year and I was in Massachusetts and could do nothing but grieve across an ocean and keep showing up anyway. It happened in a clinical internship at seventeen where I operated diagnostic equipment on real patients and understood for the first time that curiosity is not just an academic trait. It is a survival skill. The moment I stopped asking why the diagnostic tools we used were less accurate on darker skin tones was the moment I would have stopped becoming the physician I intend to be. Reinvention is the first generation inheritance. Chhin Lor reinvented himself more times than most people dare to imagine — math professor, farmer, refugee, night school student, Hewlett-Packard engineer. Each reinvention was not a retreat. It was a refusal. A refusal to let circumstance write the ending. I have reinvented myself too. From the child who could not speak the language to the student who founded a club, captained a team, completed a clinical internship, and co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that gives first generation pre-medical students the roadmaps nobody gave us. From the girl who grieved alone through the worst year of her life to the woman who is starting college this fall at San Diego State University — the first in her family — with a plan, a purpose, and the same hunger her father carried across the Pacific. Education did not save me. It gave me the tools to save myself. That is what Chhin Lor understood. That is what my father lives. That is what I am becoming.

I have spent most of my life learning how to keep going when everything says stop. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old speaking only Vietnamese. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I have worked since I was sixteen — contributing to household expenses while maintaining a 3.62 GPA, captaining my varsity volleyball team to eight regional gold medals, playing first violin in the school orchestra for ten years, founding the Marine Science and Conservation Club in ninth grade, and pursuing clinical experiences that most students my age never seek out. My senior year tested everything I had built. My stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts — too far away to be there, too close to the grief to escape it. Depression returned. I lost friendships, lost my job, got repeatedly sick. The kind of year that breaks people. I did not break. I kept showing up — for my classes, for my father, for the future I had been building since I was eight years old and did not yet know the word immigrant. That future begins this fall at San Diego State University where I will be the first in my family to attend college. I am studying Biology on a pre-medical track with the goal of becoming a dermatologist who serves underserved communities and researches how to make medical diagnosis more equitable across all skin tones. The adversity I have overcome is not one moment. It is a cumulative weight — immigration, financial instability, loss, mental health challenges, working while grieving while studying while trying to become someone my family has never had the language to imagine. I overcame it the way my father taught me to overcome everything. One shift at a time. One day at a time. Without waiting for someone to make it easier. The impact I want to make through my career is specific. I have seen what happens when the healthcare system fails people who look like me — patients whose language is not spoken, whose skin tone is not represented in diagnostic training data, whose cultural context is invisible to their providers. I want to be the physician who changes that for the patients who sit across from me. I also want to change it at scale. I have already co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative providing first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. Because Valerie Rabb spent her career uplifting students and championing their causes — and that work does not stop when one person stops. It gets carried forward by the students whose lives were changed by people who believed in them. I am one of those students. This scholarship would help me become the person who carries it forward.

I am a first generation Vietnamese-American student graduating from Marshfield High School in June 2026. I came to the United States from Ho Chi Minh City at eight years old speaking only Vietnamese. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night to keep us housed. I have worked since I was sixteen — as a barista, a retail educator, a nail technician — contributing to household expenses while maintaining a 3.62 GPA, captaining my varsity volleyball team to eight regional gold medals, playing first violin in the school orchestra for ten years, and pursuing clinical experience that most students my age never seek out. This fall I will be the first in my family to attend college — San Diego State University — where I will study Biology on a pre-medical track with the goal of becoming a physician who serves underserved communities. My community involvement has been the through line of my high school years. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club at Marshfield High School in ninth grade. I volunteered in the Surgical Services department at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. I completed a clinical internship at Lifetime Vision Optometry where I became the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted, seeing patients independently by mid-summer at seventeen. I have also co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative that provides first generation pre-medical students with honest guidance on research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. I built it so the students who come after me do not have to figure it out alone. If I could start a charity it would be called The Bridge Clinic. The mission would be simple — provide free dermatology and primary care screenings to immigrant and refugee communities across the United States, with a specific focus on patients whose first language is not English and who have historically been underserved by the healthcare system. Who would we serve — Vietnamese, Cambodian, Haitian, Somali, and other immigrant communities in urban and suburban areas where access to specialty care is limited by language barriers, cost, and lack of cultural competency among providers. What would volunteers do — physicians and medical students would provide free screenings and referrals. Bilingual volunteers would serve as patient navigators, helping families understand diagnoses, treatment options, and how to access follow up care. Pre-medical students would gain clinical hours while serving communities that desperately need their presence. The inspiration comes from something personal. My grandfather and stepfather both died of cancer in Vietnam — diseases that may have been caught earlier with better access to care. I have watched my own community navigate a healthcare system that does not speak their language, literally and figuratively. The Bridge Clinic would begin to fix that. Aserina Hill sacrificed her own earnings so others could reach their goals. She never finished school but she made sure others could. That is the kind of love that builds legacies. It is also the kind of love that built me.

I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old with my father and very little else. What we brought with us was not money or connections or a roadmap for how to succeed in America. What we brought was faith — the quiet, unshakeable kind that does not announce itself but shows up every day in how you treat other people and what you refuse to give up on. My faith is not something I wear on my sleeve. It is something I live in the decisions I make when nobody is watching. It is in the choice to keep showing up for school during the hardest year of my life — the year my stepfather died of cancer in Vietnam while I was in Massachusetts, the year depression returned, the year I lost friends and lost my job and still had to find a reason to keep going. I kept going because I was taught that suffering is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of what you do with it. Community service has been my answer to that question since I was fourteen years old. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club at Marshfield High School in ninth grade because I believed that young people should take responsibility for the world they are inheriting. I volunteered in the Surgical Services department at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston because I believe that showing up for people in their most vulnerable moments is one of the most sacred things a person can do. I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest the practice had ever accepted — because I believe that using your gifts in service of others is not optional. It is the obligation that comes with having gifts at all. Proverbs 3:27 says do not withhold good from those who deserve it when it is in your power to act. Reverend Ethel K. Grinkley lived that verse. So did my father, who drives through the night so I can sleep, who never once told me that our circumstances were a reason to dream smaller. I am starting college this fall as a first generation Vietnamese-American student studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I intend to become a physician who serves underserved communities — patients who are often overlooked by a healthcare system that was not designed for them. I have already co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat that provides first generation pre-medical students with the roadmaps and guidance that nobody ever gave us. I built it because love without action is just a feeling. Service is how love becomes real. The impact I want to leave on this world is simple. I want the people I touch — my patients, my students, my community — to feel seen. Fully seen. In a world that has often made people like me invisible, that is an act of love. It is also an act of faith. And it is the work I intend to spend my life doing.

I am not sure my father knows what the word legacy means in English. But he has been building one anyway, one night shift at a time, in a country that was not built for him. I came to the United States from Vietnam at eight years old. My father drives for Uber and Amazon through the night so I can sleep in a home he pays for with hours most people never see. I grew up watching him work without complaint, without recognition, without any guarantee that it would be enough. What he gave me was not money. It was a model. Show up. Work hard. Do not wait for someone to hand you what you need. Go get it. I took that model into every room I entered. At Marshfield High School I carried a 3.62 weighted GPA through one of the hardest years of my life — a year in which I lost my stepfather to cancer in Vietnam, lost close friendships, lost my job, and fought through a return of depression I had been managing since middle school. I did not coast through school. I earned every grade while working sixteen hours a week to contribute to household expenses and pursuing opportunities most of my classmates never sought. I founded the Marine Science and Conservation Club in ninth grade and led it for two years. I captained my varsity volleyball team to eight gold medals at regional competitions. I played first violin in the school orchestra for a decade. I was selected to attend the United States Naval Academy Summer STEM Program — chosen from a national applicant pool. I completed a clinical internship at Lifetime Vision Optometry where I became the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted, operating diagnostic equipment and seeing patients independently by mid-summer at seventeen. None of these things happened because I had advantages. They happened because I refused to let the absence of advantages become an excuse. The legacy I am building is both personal and communal. I have co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative that provides first generation pre-medical students with honest roadmaps for navigating research, clinical hours, MCAT preparation, and medical school applications. I built it because nobody built it for me. I built it so that the students who come after me — students who grew up the way I did, without physician parents or financial safety nets or anyone at the dinner table who had done this before — do not have to figure it out alone. I am starting at San Diego State University this fall as a first generation college student studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I intend to become a dermatologist who serves underserved communities and researches how to make medical diagnosis more equitable across all skin tones. That goal did not come from a textbook. It came from a life spent navigating systems that were not designed for people like me — and deciding that the right response was not resentment but action. John F. Puffer, Sr. spent his life helping those around him with an infectious smile and an impressive work ethic. My father has the same ethic. I inherited it. This scholarship would honor both of them.

I did not fall in love with STEM in a classroom. I fell in love with it in a clinic, holding a piece of equipment I had never seen before, learning what it could see that the human eye could not. The summer before college I worked as a clinical intern at Lifetime Vision Optometry — the youngest intern the practice had ever accepted. I operated diagnostic imaging equipment including OCT scanners, fundus cameras, and automated visual field testing systems. I was seventeen years old, and for the first time science stopped being abstract. It became something I could hold in my hands, point at a patient, and use to help them. That experience changed everything I thought I understood about what STEM actually is. STEM is not equations on a whiteboard. It is the technology that catches disease before it becomes catastrophic. It is the algorithm that reads a retinal scan and flags an anomaly a physician might have missed. It is the data that tells us which populations are being underserved by the tools we have already built — and the research that builds better ones. That last part is where my passion lives. Working in that clinic I observed something I could not unfocus on once I saw it: the diagnostic tools we use in medicine are only as equitable as the populations they were designed for. AI-assisted diagnostic systems trained predominantly on lighter skin tones produce less accurate results for patients with darker complexions — patients who look like me, like my mother, like the Vietnamese families I grew up around. That is not a theoretical problem. That is a real failure happening in real clinics to real patients right now. And it is a STEM problem. It requires biology, data science, machine learning, and clinical research working together to fix it. I am pursuing a Biology degree at San Diego State University with a Data Science minor specifically because I want to work at that intersection. I want to become a physician and a researcher who uses computational methods to make diagnostic medicine more accurate and more equitable across all skin tones. The science is the foundation. Without it I cannot ask the right questions. Without it I cannot build the tools that do not yet exist. Without it I am just someone who cares about a problem without the ability to solve it. I come from a family that could not afford to show me what STEM looked like from the inside. My father drives through the night so I can sleep. There was no scientist at our dinner table explaining how research works, no physician parent showing me what a career in medicine actually looks like day to day. I found my way into a clinic at seventeen through persistence and luck. I intend to spend the rest of my career making sure the students who come after me — the ones who look like me, who grew up like me — do not have to rely on luck to find their way in. STEM gave me a way to turn what I have lived into something that helps other people. That is why I cannot imagine doing anything else.

I learned about money the way most children of immigrants do — not from a class, not from a book, but from watching my father count what was left after the bills were paid. My father came to the United States from Vietnam with nothing. He drives for Uber and Amazon — nights mostly, the shifts nobody else wants — to keep us housed and fed. Growing up, I understood early that money in our family was not something you spent carelessly. It was something you protected. Every dollar my father earned represented an hour of his life, and I watched him spend those hours carefully so that I would not have to spend mine the same way. That education did not come with terminology. I did not know what a credit score was. I did not know what compound interest meant. I did not understand the difference between a subsidized and unsubsidized loan, or why one cost more than the other. What I knew was simpler and more visceral — that financial instability is not just stressful. It is dangerous. It closes doors before you even know they existed. My father recently filed for bankruptcy. I watched him navigate a system that was not designed for someone who learned English as an adult and never had the privilege of financial education. I watched him make decisions not because they were wrong but because he did not have the information he needed to make better ones. That experience did not make me angry. It made me determined. Financial literacy is not a luxury subject. It is a survival skill that too many first generation immigrant families never get access to — and the consequences follow them for generations. I am starting college at San Diego State University this fall as a first generation student studying Biology on a pre-medical track. I have no family safety net. My father cannot co-sign loans. There is no savings account with my name on it. Everything I build from here I build from scratch. In the last year alone I have taught myself more about financial aid, federal methodology, income driven repayment, and the true cost of borrowing than my father learned in twenty years of living in this country. Not because I am smarter. Because I finally had access to information he never did. That access changed my life. And I intend to pay it forward. I co-founded a platform called FirstWhiteCoat — a social impact initiative providing first generation pre-medical students with honest road maps for navigating college and medical school. Financial literacy is one of the pillars I am building into that platform — because first generation students who do not understand loan repayment make decisions during college that follow them through residency and beyond. This scholarship would reduce what I need to borrow in my first year and give me the financial stability to focus entirely on my academics. But more than that it would become part of the story I tell other students who look like me — that financial education is power, that power can be passed on, and that one person understanding these systems better changes not just their own life but everyone they teach afterward.