My ideal career has always been in the medical field, but my ultimate life goal is to serve as a compassionate and informed bridge between physicians and policymakers. This objective did not evolve overnight but rather grew along with my experiences in my family, community, and in local politics. During a high school internship with a local congressional campaign where I canvassed prospective voters on the issues that mattered to them, I found that access to affordable healthcare was a common topic of concern among voters of all backgrounds. Growing up in a family that suffered from back-to-back chronic health issues, I shared those same concerns. As a child, I saw firsthand how difficult navigating the healthcare system was for my grandparents as immigrants who struggled with the language. In high school, I noted how multiple specialists repeatedly ignored my mother’s health concerns until a routine check revealed a heart valve defect. I could not help but wonder if the care that my family received might have been different if their doctors were trained to look at diverse patients differently and recognize diverse needs. It was in these early days that I realized I wanted to be more than a good doctor. I want to advocate for stricter health equity measures that hold physicians and the healthcare system accountable to the patients who rely on them. Although so many of my goals in medicine lie ahead of me, I have been anxious to find ways to make a difference as a concerned undergraduate. At the beginning of 2022, I interned with the Texas nonprofit CHILDREN AT RISK where I specialized in policy research on child and family health. Working through immense amounts of data on healthcare outcomes in my native Houston, I quickly learned that the maternal mortality rate for Black and Brown women was several times higher than that of women of any other race. Beyond the facts and figures, I knew that there was an underlying problem that the data could not quite explain. It was the same phenomenon, I suspected, that kept my mother from getting the care she needed for so many months. As a research assistant in the University of Virginia Social Cognition and Behavior Lab, I have been given an opportunity to address health inequity, specifically in women's health. I am currently the principal investigator on a study that seeks to understand how and why pain experienced by pregnant women of color is perceived differently by the general public. The implication of this study is to hopefully understand how culturally ingrained bias seeps into medical care, even for physicians who are highly caring and self-aware. With this knowledge, I believe that there are public policy steps that can be taken to improve medical training and alter healthcare policies such as high costs that make marginalized communities weary of the doctor's office. As a future physician and current policy wonk, I am passionate about turning research and words into action. To this end, I plan to intern with a member of Congress this coming summer to further study health policy and share the concerns I have heard from my community. I sincerely hope that the work that I have started today will raise a broader conversation about healthcare equity as it affects all of us.