"What do you want to be when you grow up?" As a child, I had the answer: "An astronaut!" I loved the moon and stars, in awe of the vastness of the night sky, and dreamed of touring the solar system. I didn't know yet that this fascination with the universe would one day lead me to medicine instead. The summer before my junior year, my best friend, Rudy, passed away from a rare form of liver cancer. Just months before, we were inseparable: talking at our side-by-side lockers, designing dream cars during lunch, and mapping out our lives together. I struggled to comprehend how someone so full of life could be gone so suddenly. No amount of counseling fixed the nightmares and sleepless nights. Honestly, I was falling apart. One night, after aimlessly scrolling online, I came across a video, "The Scale of the Universe," zooming out from the smallest particles to galaxies beyond comprehension. For the first time since Rudy's passing, I felt a strange calm, as if my grief had briefly disappeared into the endless cosmos. Something clicked: just as the world would keep spinning, I could keep going, too. Life is fleeting, which makes the way we spend it all the more important. In that moment, I decided to live with gratitude and purpose, and to put that purpose toward medicine. Before Rudy's passing, I had already started cancer immunology research at Case Western Reserve University. Since then, that work has grown into two projects: one on inhibiting T-cell exhaustion pathways, so the immune system doesn't give up on fighting tumors, and another on enhancing antigen presentation through immunoproteasome activation, so tumors become more visible to the immune system in the first place. After Rudy's death, this research took on new meaning. It wasn't about solving abstract problems, I realized, but helping people: making sure no teenager has to face an incurable disease and no parent has to plan their child's funeral. That perspective became my driving force. I quickly learned that scientific discovery is only half the battle since cancer takes a harsher toll on some communities than others. I designed and ran a community survey and found that teens from low-income families are often "high-risk" due to lifestyle factors reducible through education and early intervention. I also mapped life expectancy across Cleveland's historically redlined districts and saw how decades-old discrimination still shapes access to care today. Rudy's death had taught me that cancer is personal and my community work taught me it is also political, and that policy and health are inseparable. That project became the second half of how I want to contribute: not just discovering better treatments, but fighting for who actually gets them. Since then, I have thought of my future in medicine as twofold. In the lab, I want to keep pushing cancer immunology forward, building on the work I've already started, helping bodies' natural defenses work more effectively. Simultaneously, I want to keep doing community-level work, pushing for the education and policy changes that decide who actually benefits from those discoveries. I no longer aspire to space travel, but I think about research the same way I once thought about the night sky: as unmapped territory worth exploring, whether it's the microscopic galaxies within our own cells or the gaps in a city's healthcare access. Every mutation I study and every district I map is a step toward a future where fewer families lose someone like Rudy which to me, is the greatest adventure.