My values were shaped long before I understood the word "psychiatry." They came from riding in the back of an ambulance as an EMT crew chief and Lieutenant, watching a teenager go quiet after an overdose call. They came from a Valentine's Day shift on Crisis Text Line as a Counselor, staying on the line with a teenager who didn't think they'd make it to the next morning. They came from losing my friend Rohit to an overdose, a loss that taught me, more than any lecture could, that by the time someone reaches a crisis line or an ambulance, we have often already failed them upstream. That is the value at the center of everything I do: prevention over crisis response. I believe the most meaningful impact in mental health doesn't happen in the emergency department or on a hotline call, but though that work saves lives and I will never diminish it. It happens earlier: in a classroom where a teenager learns that CPR and bystander intervention aren't just skills for a stranger, but tools they can use for a friend. It happens in a literary magazine where a young person writes their way through a hard year instead of carrying it alone. It happens when a curriculum teaches emotional regulation before a crisis, not after one. This value has shaped every part of my path. Through MedicZero, the CPR and bystander-intervention curriculum I lead in high schools in Carteret and Middlesex County, I try to reach students before they're the ones calling 911. This gives them the confidence and skills to act in the moments that matter most. Through The Elysian Muse, the youth mental health literary magazine I founded during the pandemic, I built something more preventive than reactive: a space where young people could process what they were feeling before it became something heavier. My research with Dr. Maurice Elias's SECD Lab and the SAS Interdisciplinary Research Program, developing Social-Emotional Learning-integrated curricula for special needs youth, reflects the same belief: social-emotional skills are protective factors, not afterthoughts. My second value is community-rootedness. I grew up in Edison and South Brunswick in a bicultural household, watching my father build an entirely new professional life in this country from nothing. That experience taught me that support systems have to be built, deliberately, for the people who don't already have them. As a Resident Assistant for Rutgers' Health and Medicine Living Learning Community, I tried to build that kind of scaffolding for my own residents. As a future pediatrician focused on adolescent mental health in underserved communities, I want to build it for my patients. As I move forward in medicine, these values won't stay in the background. Instead, they'll shape how I practice. I want to be a pediatrician who asks about a teenager's home life and social pressures with the same seriousness I ask about their symptoms, who treats prevention as real medicine, and who never forgets that the young people most in need of upstream care are often the ones with the least access to it.

I’m building a culture where bystanders save lives instead of waiting for permission to help. When my grandmother collapsed at a marketplace in Pune, India, I was ten years old. Despite the crowd around her, no one administered CPR. She died, before the ambulance arrived, of a cardiac event that might have been survivable with immediate intervention. For years, I didn’t understand why no one stepped forward. It was only later that I realized the barriers weren’t just knowledge or confidence. They were systemic: a lack of training, hesitation rooted in fear, and infrastructure that left bystanders feeling helpless. Years into my EMT work with the Kendall Park First Aid and Rescue Squad, I responded to a cardiac arrest call that showed me the other side of that equation. A Rutgers professor had collapsed, and his three young sons (the oldest barely in middle school) recognized what was happening and began hands-only CPR. When we arrived, they had already given their father a chance. He survived and later spoke about how those boys’ quick thinking had “not only saved my life, but influenced all the people I reach every day.” The contrast haunted me. Two cardiac arrests. In one case, bystanders were trained and acted. In the other, they weren’t, and someone died. That’s what MedicZero is built to change. As a High School Curriculum Project Development Lead, I helped design a hands-only CPR curriculum for high school students. Our team created something accessible, practical, and grounded in real stories. We piloted it at Carteret and Middlesex High Schools. When I taught those classes, I told the students about the three boys who saved their father’s life. I told them about my grandmother. I wanted them to understand that knowing CPR isn’t just about mastering technique; it’s about recognizing that you have power in an emergency. MedicZero isn’t just about training kids, but about dismantling the barriers that keep bystanders frozen. It’s about embedding CPR literacy into communities where it’s most needed, where access to emergency care is often delayed. Helping build MedicZero’s High School CPR program means building infrastructure for prevention. It means recognizing that the gap between someone collapsing and effective intervention is contingent on both knowledge and confidence. As I move forward into medicine, MedicZero represents my commitment to working upstream. I won’t just treat cardiac arrests in an emergency department; I’ll work to prevent preventable deaths before they reach me. I’ll continue building systems where bystanders feel equipped, authorized, and empowered to act, where the culture around emergency response shifts from “wait for help” to “you are help.” My grandmother taught me that delayed intervention costs lives. The three boys who saved their father taught me that immediate intervention saves them. MedicZero is how I’m scaling that lesson.

I love math because it's an intricate language, particularly one I learned alongside my father. Growing up, math was how we connected. While other families bonded over dinner table conversation, my dad and I worked through Kumon and Aloha packets and school worksheets. He'd show me how numbers could express ideas that words couldn't quite capture, and in those moments, math became more than computation. It became a bridge between us, a tangible way to share his problem-solving mindset and his belief that persistence pays off. That foundation has never left me. Beyond its role in my family, math appeals to the way my mind works. Every equation is a puzzle, a challenge to think critically about why it's constructed a certain way and what that structure reveals. I love the logic of it, the way one small error cascades through an entire calculation, forcing me to backtrack and find where my reasoning broke down. That discipline has shaped how I approach problems in every part of my life, not just academics. As a medical student, I see this play out daily. Statistics guide my research work, allowing me to ask meaningful questions about health outcomes and test whether interventions actually work. Without math, I'd be left with anecdotes rather than evidence, and evidence is what changes systems. It's what prevents harm rather than simply responding to it after the fact. Math is how we move upstream, away from crisis and toward prevention. That's ultimately why math captivates me: it's not just about solving for x. It's about understanding the systems that shape outcomes, whether those systems are academic, medical, or social. Math gives me the tools to ask hard questions and trust the answers I find. It connects me to my father's legacy, challenges my reasoning, and most importantly, it's fundamental to the kind of medicine I want to practice: preventive, data-informed, and grounded in evidence rather than assumption. Math has always been my language. Going forward in my medical training, I'll stay fluent in speaking it.

I never liked calling him an addict. To me, he was always just my Kaka, my uncle, the man who made his signature masala popcorn for movie nights and sang off-key Bollywood songs while washing the dishes. But by middle school, his addiction had begun to overshadow the man I knew. The smell of alcohol clung to his breath so persistently that I forgot what he was supposed to smell like. The night he fell down the stairs, I stood dazed as my mother stopped the bleeding with trembling hands, and I felt the helplessness of watching someone suffer in a way that can't be bandaged or stitched. Years later, as an EMT, I felt that helplessness again. After two doses of Narcan, "Sara" jolted awake, confused, afraid, and thrust into the agony of withdrawal. My squad spent thirty minutes gently coaxing her toward the hospital, and I watched a silent war rage behind her teary eyes before we left with nothing but a refusal form. On our way out, an officer mentioned giving the same speech two years earlier in vain to a 'Rohit Jain'. Recognizing the name as my friend's, I inquired further and learned that Rohit had died of an overdose days ago. No one warned him about the slope from dependency to addiction. No one caught him when he began to slip, not until it was too late. Addiction doesn't look like the after-school specials made it seem. Sometimes it's your uncle. Sometimes it's your friend. And in every role I've held since, as an EMT and lieutenant, Crisis Text Line counselor, resident assistant on a campus that stocked Narcan in every bathroom, I've met people in crisis and learned the same lesson: reversing an overdose is not the same as saving a life. By the time the ambulance arrives, the story is already years old. That is the change I'm determined to create: care that arrives earlier. This summer, I begin at New Jersey Medical School on my way to becoming a pediatrician focused on adolescent mental health in underserved communities. I hope to see mental health and substance use screening woven directly into pediatric primary care, so that struggling is noticed at a routine checkup rather than in the back of an ambulance. Mental illness and addiction grow together, often invisibly, and for many families in the communities I want to serve, a pediatrician is the only clinician they consistently see. That visit should catch a fourteen-year-old beginning to slip, not just measure height and weight. I've already started building toward this. In the Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab at Rutgers, I researched how schools can teach resilience before problems take root. I founded The Elysian Muse, a literary magazine where young people write about their mental health, because a teenager who can name what they're feeling might say it out loud to someone who can help. I created MedicZero, a first-aid curriculum, believing ordinary people can be the earliest responders if someone teaches them how. My education will let me return to communities like the ones that shaped me, as a physician who not only responds to the immediate crisis, but leads the healing, advocates for systemic change, and stays when the crisis subsides. I want to build a world where no one has to wonder, at a funeral, whether their friend would still be here if someone had caught him. I've spent years arriving too late. I intend to spend my career arriving early.

The first time I understood what science could do, I wasn't in a lab. I was in the back of an ambulance, running through protocols I had memorized as an EMT. These protocols existed because someone, somewhere, had studied what happens to a body in crisis and turned that knowledge into steps a nineteen-year-old could follow at 2 a.m. That realization stayed with me: science is how we take what we learn from emergencies and hand it forward, so the next person doesn't have to improvise. I chose to further my education in STEAM, first at Rutgers, and now at New Jersey Medical School, because I kept meeting the limits of what I could do without it. As a Crisis Text Line counselor, I could sit with a teenager at the worst hour of their night, but I couldn't change the conditions that brought them there. As an EMT lieutenant, I could respond to a call, but I arrived, by definition, after something had already gone wrong. Every role I held taught me the same lesson from a different angle: crisis response matters, but prevention is where the real leverage lives. And prevention is a science. That understanding took shape in the Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab at Rutgers, where I researched adolescent development under Dr. Maurice Elias. There I learned that the emotional skills protecting young people from crisis (self-regulation, problem-solving, connection) can be studied, measured, and taught. I earned a fellowship, presented a first-author poster, and, more importantly, found the framework for my career: I want to be a pediatrician who treats adolescent mental health the way we treat any other health outcome, with early intervention grounded in evidence, especially in communities that are usually reached last. I've already started testing that approach. I developed MedicZero, a first-aid curriculum, because I believed the knowledge I used in the ambulance shouldn't require an ambulance to arrive. I founded The Elysian Muse, a youth mental health literary magazine, because research kept pointing to expression and belonging as protective factors. So, I built a place where teenagers could practice both. Neither project required an M.D. But both showed me the ceiling of what I can do without one. My father immigrated from Maharashtra and became the first in his family to build a professional career in this country. He didn't hand me a roadmap to medicine, but he handed me the conviction that education is how you convert effort into a life that serves more people than yourself. Medical school is the most expensive conviction I've ever acted on. The cost of attendance at NJMS will require significant loans, and every dollar of scholarship support directly changes the math of my future: less debt means more freedom to choose adolescent psychiatry-informed pediatrics and community-based practice over the highest-paying option, and to work in the underserved neighborhoods where prevention is needed most and funded least. This scholarship would not just help me get through medical school. It would help determine what kind of doctor I can afford to become. I want to be the one who shows up before the ambulance is called, and a STEAM education is how I get there.

As an EMT, I learned quickly that we rarely responded to just one problem. The calls that stayed with me were the ones where a mental health crisis and substance use arrived tangled together: a young person whose panic and intoxication couldn't be separated into neat categories, whose chart would eventually list two diagnoses but whose suffering was one thing. Our protocols treated the immediate emergency. Then we transferred care, cleared the scene, and often, months later, met the same person again. That pattern, crisis, stabilization, repeat, is why I'm pursuing medicine, and why I intend to specialize in pediatrics with a focus on adolescent mental health. This month I begin at New Jersey Medical School, and I'm arriving with a conviction built over four years of working the reactive end of the system: as an EMT lieutenant, and as a volunteer crisis counselor with Crisis Text Line, where I spent late nights texting with teenagers who had nowhere else to turn. The work mattered. But crisis response is, by definition, arriving after the system has already failed someone. Half of all lifetime mental illness begins by adolescence, and substance use so often takes root in that same window. Not as a separate problem, but as an attempt to manage pain that no one had yet named or treated. If we reached young people then, fewer of the calls I answered would ever need to be made. I've spent my time outside the ambulance trying to work on that earlier end. In the Rutgers Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab, I researched how adolescents build the internal resources that protect mental health before it breaks. I founded The Elysian Muse, a literary magazine where young people write about their inner lives — because a teenager who can articulate what they're feeling, and be heard, is a teenager less likely to bury it. None of this replaces clinical care. But it taught me that prevention isn't abstract; it's built from small, early, human interventions. As a pediatrician, I want to make the primary care visit a place where mental health and substance use are addressed as routinely as growth charts, screened for early, discussed without shame, and treated together rather than referred into two separate systems that don't speak to each other. That fragmentation is one of the quietest cruelties of our current model: a young person with co-occurring conditions is too often bounced between providers who each treat half of them. Integrated care within pediatrics, especially in underserved communities where specialty access is scarce, is where I believe I can do the most good. Humanizing mental health care, to me, means continuity. It means being the physician who knows a patient at twelve and is still listening at seventeen, who notices the change in affect before it becomes a crisis, and who treats substance use as a medical problem deserving of care rather than a moral failing deserving of judgment. I never met Brian, but I've sat with young people in the moments his family knows too well. I'm pursuing this career so that more of those moments get interrupted years earlier, in an exam room, by someone who was paying attention all along.

Most nights on Crisis Text Line, I'm talking to someone who has already reached a breaking point. Most days as an EMT, I'm arriving after something has already gone wrong. Both roles have taught me a lot about what it means to show up for a community in crisis., but they've also taught me the limits of that kind of help; by the time someone reaches out to a crisis line or calls 911, the systems meant to catch them earlier have usually already failed. That realization is what pushed me toward building things that intervene before the crisis, not just during it. That's why I founded The Elysian Muse during the pandemic, a literary magazine for youth mental health. I started it because I noticed that the teenagers around me had plenty of ways to talk about being in crisis and very few ways to talk about the quieter, harder-to-name parts of struggling: the isolation, the uncertainty, the feeling of being unseen by the adults around them. A magazine seemed like a small thing to offer against that, but it gave young writers a way to put language to what they were feeling before it became something more urgent, and it gave readers proof that they weren't the only ones feeling it. Running it meant soliciting submissions, editing other students' work with care, and building something that treated teenagers' inner lives as worth taking seriously. It's the project I'm proudest of, because it was built on the belief that community can be preventive medicine, not just a response to harm. I've tried to carry that same belief into more hands-on work. As a Resident Assistant, I saw how much of student wellbeing depends on the small, unglamorous work of noticing, which includes checking in on someone who's gone quiet, connecting a struggling student with resources before things escalate. Through MedicZero Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to improving bystander CPR and first-aid literacy rates, I developed and led a first-aid curriculum aimed at giving people (many of whom had never had formal training) the skills and confidence to respond when something happens to someone in their own community, rather than waiting helplessly for someone else to arrive. I've also volunteered with the Urban Health Collaborative and at Saint Peter's Hospital, work that showed me how unevenly access to care and information is distributed, and how much of a difference it makes when someone is willing to meet people where they are instead of waiting for them to find their way to a hospital or a hotline. None of these efforts, on their own, solve the deeper problems in the communities I've been part of. But I don't think that's really the point. A magazine won't replace access to a therapist. A first-aid class won't replace an ambulance. What they can do is close some of the distance between people and the help they need, and remind people that someone around them is paying attention. That's the same instinct I want to bring into pediatrics: not just treating adolescents once they're in crisis, but building the kind of surrounding community that makes crises less likely to happen in the first place.

I want to become a pediatrician working in adolescent mental health, in the communities where that care is hardest to find. I graduated from Rutgers in May 2025, and after a gap year I start at New Jersey Medical School in about a month. The work that brought me here started in crisis. I'm an EMT and a counselor for Crisis Text Line, so much of my early experience meant meeting people at the worst moment of their day and trying to keep that moment from becoming the end of something. That work matters, but it taught me to pay attention to everything that comes before it. At Rutgers' SECD Lab I researched adolescent development, and I founded The Elysian Muse, a youth mental health literary magazine that gives young people somewhere to put what they're carrying before it has nowhere to go. My long-term goal is to practice medicine and build the kind of earlier, steadier support that keeps fewer kids from ever needing the crisis version of care. I need this scholarship for a practical reason, and a less obvious one. Because I begin medical school after July 1, 2026, I'm a new borrower under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated the Grad PLUS loans that once let medical students borrow up to the full cost of attendance and capped my federal borrowing at $50,000 a year. My tuition alone is $50,000, and housing adds another $17,000, before I've covered my day-to-day living expenses for four years, all of which I'll unfortunately have to make up in private loans. The less obvious reason is that the work I want to do (pediatrics in underserved communities, eventually public health and nonprofit medicine) is meaningful and not lucrative. The less my future is dictated by debt, the more freely I can choose the patients and communities I went into medicine to serve in the first place. And then there's the music. Heavy metal is the genre I reach for when something needs to come out and there's no easy, digestible, or polite version of it. In my work I spend a lot of time helping people sit with feelings too big to say plainly, and metal doesn't ask anyone to make those feelings smaller. Rather, it unapologetically turns the volume up on them. My anchor is Metallica; it's the band that pulled me in and the one I'd call metal without any qualifiers. From there my taste drifts toward the heavier edge of rock more than the deepest end of metal, and I've made peace with that. Rage Against the Machine for the controlled fury, and then a run of bands closer to grunge (Soundgarden, Audioslave, Alice in Chains). Audioslave is half of Rage anyway, and Alice in Chains is about as heavy as grunge ever got, so that seam has always felt kind of like home. I saw Metallica at Lincoln Financial Field in Philly in May 2025. What I remember most is the end, when they played "Enter Sandman" and everyone sang it back at once. As enormous as that was, the night didn't feel like a spectacle so much as something shared: thousands of strangers being personal together, all at the same volume, the intensity of the music, the crowd pushing up the large beach balls. Earlier in the show, Hetfield spoke before "Fade to Black," a song about being at the very bottom, and the stadium went still to listen. I work in the spaces that song is about. Hearing that many people hold quiet for it, then carry it together, was the clearest version of what I believe about this music: that naming the dark out loud, in a crowd, is its own kind of care. What metal and medicine have in common, for me, is that both take intensity seriously instead of asking people to tone it down. That's the thread I want to carry into my career, and the reason this support would truly mean something.

I came to golf the way a lot of people my age do: through Topgolf bays and the neon-lit holes of minigolf places around town (Monster Mini Golf being my favorite!), where the point was less the score and more the company. Somewhere along the way, though, the game itself got under my skin. These days my friends and I have graduated to Tamarack Golf Course nearby, and what started as a casual outing has turned into something I genuinely look forward to. What I love about golf is that it holds two things at once. On one hand, it's deeply social. It holds the opportunity of being able to spend a few hours walking and laughing with friends, with plenty of time between shots to actually talk. On the other, it's a quiet personal challenge. There's no opponent to blame and no clock to beat; it's just you, the ball, and whatever focus you can bring to the next swing. I find that strangely freeing. When life gets stressful, I'll head to the range by myself, and there's something about the rhythm of hitting bucket after bucket that empties my mind completely. The course itself definitely helps, as well: wide open plains, rarely crowded, usually peaceful enough that you forget how close it is to everything else. It has become my way of resetting. The challenge I've faced as a female golfer has been a quieter one. When my friends and I first started playing, plenty of people came along. But as the casual outings turned into a regular habit, the group thinned out and the ones who stayed interested were almost all guys. Eventually we started a small interest group in our community to keep the momentum going, and meeting after meeting, I've found myself the only girl in the group. That absence could easily have pushed me out, too. Instead, I've chosen to treat it as a reason to stay. I keep showing up, keep improving, and try to be visible proof that this is a space women can occupy and enjoy just as much as anyone else. Being the only girl in the group has made me more comfortable, not less, with standing on my own in rooms that skew male, and it's made me hope that the next girl who's curious about golf sees someone who looks like her already out there on the tee. That lesson reaches well beyond the course. As a woman heading into a field where I'll often be one of few, golf has quietly taught me how to walk into a room that wasn't built with me in mind and make it mine anyway.

There's a moment in Olivia Rodrigo's Sour that I wasn't prepared for. After ten songs about heartbreak, the album closes with "hope ur ok," and the whole lens shifts. The song stops looking inward and turns toward other people, the ones we lose track of, who were hurting quietly while the rest of us were busy living. Rodrigo spends it wishing them well without ever knowing whether they made it somewhere safe. That ache of hoping into silence is the closest thing I have found to language for what I carry. I lost a friend to an overdose. "Rohit" was the kind of person who filled a room, quick to laugh, quicker to ask if you were okay, and somehow that made the hidden weight harder to believe. We don't always get to see what other people are carrying. By the time many of us understood how much pain was underneath, there was nothing left to do but grieve, and the grief came tangled with guilt: the replay of signs I might have missed, the conversations I wish I had started sooner. For a long time, the simple hope at the heart of that song felt useless to me. Wishing someone were okay couldn't undo anything. But grief has a way of redirecting you. I had trained as an EMT before, yet afterward the work carried a different charge. Every call a reminder that behind a set of vitals is a whole person and the people who love them. As a Crisis Text Line counselor, I began showing up for strangers in their worst hours, learning that you rarely get to know how the story ends. You offer presence, you hope, and then you let go. The not knowing never stops being hard. I just stopped letting it stop me. What I have learned, and what the song names so plainly, is that struggle is mostly invisible. The friend who seems steadiest may be the one barely holding on. The student laughing in the back row may be going home to something unbearable. I used to think compassion meant the most when it came with fixing things. Now, I think it more often means paying attention, noticing the person before the crisis announces itself, asking the question early, refusing to assume someone is fine just because they look it. That belief is why I am going into medicine, and why I want to care for adolescents and the communities that get overlooked. I want to be the adult who notices. My friend's death is not a tidy lesson, and I won't pretend it resolved into one. But it gave me a clearer sense of the kind of person, and physician, I am trying to become: someone who treats unseen pain as seriously as the visible kind, and who keeps showing up even when hope is all I have to offer. I still listen to that last track sometimes. It no longer feels powerless. It feels like a promise I am trying to keep to the people I lost, and to the ones still here.

On Valentine's night in 2022, a record-breaking three hundred people sat waiting in the Crisis Text Line queue. The conversation I picked up opened with five words I have never forgotten: "I don't want to die anymore." A teenage girl had just tried to take her own life after a breakup, and she was texting because she could not bear to face it alone. I helped her wake her parents, stay calm, and hold on, staying with her message by message as emergency services raced toward her. That night showed me what empathy can do in the narrow space between life and death. It also showed me its limits. I could reach her in her worst moment, yet I knew almost nothing about why that moment had come: the isolation, the cost of care, the silence around mental health that had carried her there. That gap is why I want to build my career in public health and the nonprofit sector. I am drawn to the work that happens upstream, where you treat not only the person in front of you but the circumstances that keep producing crises. I came to this conviction one person at a time. As an EMT, I learned that the worst emergencies are rarely only medical; they are housing, addiction, fear, and the absence of anyone to call. Volunteering at Saint Peter's Hospital and working with The Urban Health Collaborative, a nonprofit dedicated to bettering public health outcomes in New Brunswick, I met the same truth from different angles: individual care is essential and never sufficient. A child can be treated and sent home to the exact environment that made them sick. Nonprofit public health work is one of the few things designed to follow people home. My family taught me to notice who gets left out. My father grew up in Ratnapur, a village in Maharashtra, where a serious illness could quietly decide the course of a life. He became the first in his family to build a career in the United States, but I grew up understanding that good outcomes are not evenly distributed. They depend on where you are born and what your community can offer. When I founded The Elysian Muse, a youth mental health literary magazine, during the pandemic, I was trying to build a free, accessible space where young people could name what they felt without shame or cost. The freedom to build for need rather than for profit is what draws me to the nonprofit sector. I hope to spend my career working with a public health nonprofit, eventually as a physician whose practice is inseparable from community-based prevention. I want to design programs the way I helped build a first-aid curriculum with MedicZero, a non-profit dedicated to educating bystanders about CPR and other life-saving first aid skills: starting from what a community actually lacks, then teaching skills people can keep for a lifetime. I want mental health support that reaches a teenager before a crisis, not only during one. I want care that treats a neighborhood, not only one patient's chart. I know this work is often slow and underfunded, and that no single program can ever truly "finish" the job. Regardless, I hope to spend my career addressing the conditions that produce crises than only responding to them. That is the work the nonprofit sector exists to do, and the work I want to do with it.

I never liked calling him an addict. To me, he was always just my Kaka, my uncle, the man who made his signature masala popcorn for movie nights and sang slightly off-key Bollywood songs while washing the dishes. At first, my cousins and I overlooked his wine-stained goodnight kisses because they were kisses all the same, and we didn't mind catching him guzzling a bottle of "you wouldn't like it, it's spicy" at 11 PM because it meant he stayed home from work the next day. By middle school, though, his addiction had overshadowed the man I had once known. The smell of alcohol clung to his breath so persistently that I forgot what he was supposed to smell like. Once lively and talkative, his name slowly became taboo at family gatherings. The night he fell down the stairs drunk, my mother rushed to stop the bleeding from his forehead with trembling hands. I stood there, dazed, feeling the helplessness that comes with watching someone suffer in a way that can't be bandaged or stitched. I couldn't make sense of how someone I loved could be both present and vanishing at once. Fleeting Google searches between classes grew into a persistent need to understand and prevent such tragedies. Years later, I felt that helplessness again. After two doses of Narcan, "Sara" jolted awake, confused and afraid, thrust into the agony of precipitated withdrawal. My EMS squad and two officers spent nearly 30 minutes coaxing her toward the hospital and that first step to recovery. I watched a silent war rage behind her teary eyes, and knew that with every passing minute her chances of saying yes slipped away as the craving gnawed at her resolve. We left with nothing but an RMA form. One officer shook his head and noted how he'd given the same fruitless spiel two years earlier to "Rohit Jain, just 20 at the time." I felt a pang of recognition at the name but thought nothing of it, until, moments after clearing the scene, an inexplicable wave of dread washed over me. Why mention Rohit, by name, from two years ago? The ride back was a blur of worst-case scenarios. My fears were confirmed when I called my friend and learned Rohit had overdosed days earlier. No one had warned him about the slope from dependency to addiction. No one caught him as he slipped, not until it was too late. At his funeral, I couldn't stop wondering: would he still be here if someone had? This is why substance abuse is the health crisis I care most about. It doesn't look like the after-school specials made it seem; it doesn't always wear track marks or a criminal record. Sometimes it's your uncle. Sometimes it's your friend. It is insidious, complicated, painfully human, and it is everywhere. As a resident assistant, I see it in the Narcan stocked in every campus bathroom. As an EMT, a Crisis Text Line counselor, and a D.O.P.E. squad member, I've met patients in every phase: unconscious from an overdose, trembling through withdrawal, toeing the line toward help, or bravely sharing their recovery. Addiction, I've learned, isn't just about substances, but about stories, systems, and suffering. Reversing an overdose isn't the same as saving a life, but only the beginning. I care about this problem because I've watched too many people slip through the cracks, and I want to be there, the way I wish someone had been for my friend.

I never liked calling him an addict. To me, he was always just my Kaka, my uncle, the man who made his signature masala popcorn for movie nights, who used to sing (only slightly) off-key Bollywood songs while washing the dishes. At first, my cousins and I would overlook his wine-stained goodnight kisses because they were kisses all the same, and we wouldn’t mind catching him guzzling down a bottle of “you wouldn’t like it, it’s spicy” at 11 PM because it meant he got to stay home from work the next day. However, by the time I reached middle school, his addiction had begun to overshadow the man I once knew. The smell of alcohol clung to his breath so persistently that I forgot what he was supposed to smell like. Once known for his lively and talkative nature, his name slowly became taboo at family gatherings. The night he fell down the stairs while drunk, my mother rushed to stop the bleeding from his forehead with trembling hands. I stood there, dazed, and felt the helplessness that comes with seeing someone suffer in a way that can’t be bandaged or stitched. I was unable to make sense of how someone I loved could be both present and vanishing at the same time. Fleeting Google searches between classes and on the bus ride home transformed into a persistent curiosity, cultivating a desire to understand and prevent such tragedies. Years later, I felt that helplessness again. After administering two doses of Narcan, “Sara” jolted awake, eyes wide, confused, afraid, and suddenly thrust into the agony of precipitated withdrawal. My EMS squad, along with two officers, spent nearly 30 minutes on scene attempting to gently coax Sara into coming to the hospital with us and taking that first step to recovery. I watched as a silent war raged behind her teary eyes, and I could tell she was weighing every word we said against the pull of her addiction. We knew that, with every passing minute, her chances of saying yes were slipping away, as the craving to return to her high began to gnaw at her resolve. As we were leaving, sadly with nothing but an RMA form, one of the officers shook his head solemnly and noted how he’d fruitlessly given the same spiel two years ago to “Rohit Jain, just 20 years old at the time.” At that moment, I felt a pang of recognition at my friend’s name, but thought nothing of it. Moments after clearing the scene, a sudden, inexplicable wave of dread washed over me. Why did the officer bring up this interaction with Rohit of all people, from two years ago? Why mention Rohit by name? The ride back to the squad building was a blur as my mind flooded with worst-case scenarios. My worst fears were confirmed as I called my friend and learned that Rohit had passed away a couple of days prior. No one warned him about the slope from dependency to addiction. No one caught him when he began to slip, not until it was too late. At his funeral, listening to family and friends share stories, I couldn't stop thinking, would he still be here if someone had? Addiction, I’ve learned, doesn’t look like the after-school specials made it seem. It doesn’t always wear track marks or a criminal record. Sometimes, it’s your uncle. Sometimes, it’s your friend. It is insidious, complicated, and painfully human. My early exposure to addiction drew me toward medicine. Addiction, like any other sickness, isn’t just about substances, but stories, systems, and suffering. I wanted not only to understand the biology, psychiatry, and public health failures, but also to be there for those in need in more than just an emotionally supportive role, the way I wish someone had been there for my friend. As an EMT, I’ve watched the realities of addiction unfold on the front lines. As a resident assistant for a college grappling with an overwhelming substance misuse crisis, evidenced by the Narcan stocked in every bathroom, I comforted a sobbing resident unfamiliar with substances when he found his roommate passed out on the ground. As a research assistant, I’ve learned about behavioral techniques to ease cigarette addiction and social and emotional learning as a means to instill resilience and mitigate risk factors. Through my experiences, as an EMT, a Crisis Text Line Counselor, and a D.O.P.E. squad member, I’ve encountered patients in every phase of this struggle: unconscious from an overdose, trembling through withdrawal, mentally toeing the line to seek help, or bravely sharing their recovery. I’ve learned that reversing an overdose is not the same as saving a life, but that it’s only the beginning. These moments have shown me that while my roles allowed me to step in during crises, I want to take on a more continuous, transformative role in patients’ lives as a physician who not only responds to the immediate crisis, but leads the healing, advocates for systemic change, and stays when the crisis subsides. Having experienced both the personal and professional sides of addiction, I am joining New Jersey Medical School because I want to be able to say I’ve done everything in my power to help patients, like my uncle and my friend, at their most vulnerable. Medical school, however, presents a financial challenge I cannot meet on my own. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers beginning July 2026, exactly when I matriculate, and federal borrowing for professional students is now capped at $50,000 per year. Those federal loans will no longer stretch to cover my full cost of attendance. My school sits in Newark, a food desert where housing and transportation are costly, which only adds to the burden, and my family does not have the resources to bridge that gap. This scholarship would help close the distance between what I can borrow and what my education actually costs, and allow me to focus on becoming the physician I hope to become. I would be deeply grateful for the support.

I think the prompt is right that almost everyone gets teased for something growing up. For me there were two things, and oddly enough both come down to how I show up: on paper and in person. The first is the way I hold a pencil. I grip it with the pads of all five fingers touching at once, a full-fist, all-hands-on-deck hold that I've been told many times looks deeply wrong. And I do mean many times. My Kumon teachers tried to fix it. My elementary school teachers tried to fix it. My parents tried to fix it. My classmates pointed it out with the casual cruelty only kids can manage. For years it felt like everyone who watched me write wanted to pry the pencil out of my hand and re-teach me, as if I'd been doing the most basic human task incorrectly my whole life. Here's the funny part: it never mattered. My handwriting turned out perfectly fine, and my love of writing and drawing turned out better than fine. If anything, all that "you're holding it wrong" only made me dig in harder, because there's nothing quite like being told you're doing something wrong to make you want to do it beautifully out of spite. So I did. I filled sketchbooks, drafted poems, and eventually started a literary magazine for young writers and artists, all with the "wrong" grip. The second thing is how I look. My freckled, pale complexion can't do the stereotypical "Indian" label justice, despite my entirely Indian heritage and my love for the culture. Each freckle emphasizes the identity struggle every first- and second-generation immigrant knows all too well. It's a natural foil to my introversion, evoking stares from strangers on the street and shocked reactions to my fluent Marathi on every trip to India. It is the reason I grew to reject conformity and learned to find significance in the different and unusual. It is beautifully paradoxical. In New Jersey, among my Indian-American peers, it pushes me to embrace both cultures and grow comfortable with being bold. For a long time, both of these felt like flaws to apologize for: the grip that wasn't right and the face that didn't match what people expected. But somewhere along the way they stopped being things done to me and became things that were simply mine. They taught me the same lesson from two different directions: different is not the same as wrong. The unconventional grip still writes; the unexpected face is still fully, proudly Indian. If anything, the constant low hum of "that's not how it's supposed to be" gave me an early and durable comfort with standing out. So that's me, awkward things and all. I hold my pencil like I'm trying to strangle it, I get double-takes in two countries, and I've stopped wishing either were different. I've learned that the parts of me that don't fit the template are usually the parts worth keeping.

I never liked calling him an addict. To me, he was always just my Kaka, my uncle, the man who made his signature masala popcorn for movie nights, who used to sing (only slightly) off-key Bollywood songs while washing the dishes. At first, my cousins and I would overlook his wine-stained goodnight kisses because they were kisses all the same, and we wouldn’t mind catching him guzzling down a bottle of “you wouldn’t like it, it’s spicy” at 11 PM because it meant he got to stay home from work the next day. However, by the time I reached middle school, his addiction had begun to overshadow the man I once knew. The smell of alcohol clung to his breath so persistently that I forgot what he was supposed to smell like. Once known for his lively and talkative nature, his name slowly became taboo at family gatherings. The night he fell down the stairs while drunk, my mother rushed to stop the bleeding from his forehead with trembling hands. I stood there, dazed, and felt the helplessness that comes with seeing someone suffer in a way that can’t be bandaged or stitched. I was unable to make sense of how someone I loved could be both present and vanishing at the same time. Fleeting Google searches between classes and on the bus ride home transformed into a persistent curiosity, cultivating a desire to understand and prevent such tragedies. Years later, I felt that helplessness again. After administering two doses of Narcan, “Sara” jolted awake, eyes wide, confused, afraid, and suddenly thrust into the agony of precipitated withdrawal. My EMS squad, along with two officers, spent nearly 30 minutes on scene attempting to gently coax Sara into coming to the hospital with us and taking that first step to recovery. I watched as a silent war raged behind her teary eyes, and I could tell she was weighing every word we said against the pull of her addiction. We knew that, with every passing minute, her chances of saying yes were slipping away, as the craving to return to her high began to gnaw at her resolve. As we were leaving, sadly with nothing but an RMA form, one of the officers shook his head solemnly and noted how he’d fruitlessly given the same spiel two years ago to “Rohit Jain, just 20 years old at the time.” At that moment, I felt a pang of recognition at my friend’s name, but thought nothing of it. Moments after clearing the scene, a sudden, inexplicable wave of dread washed over me. Why did the officer bring up this interaction with Rohit of all people, from two years ago? Why mention Rohit by name? The ride back to the squad building was a blur as my mind flooded with worst-case scenarios. My worst fears were confirmed as I called my friend and learned that Rohit had passed away a couple of days prior. No one warned him about the slope from dependency to addiction. No one caught him when he began to slip, not until it was too late. At his funeral, listening to family and friends share stories, I couldn't stop thinking, would he still be here if someone had? Addiction, I’ve learned, doesn’t look like the after-school specials made it seem. It doesn’t always wear track marks or a criminal record. Sometimes, it’s your uncle. Sometimes, it’s your friend. It is insidious, complicated, and painfully human. My early exposure to addiction drew me toward medicine. Addiction, like any other sickness, isn’t just about substances, but stories, systems, and suffering. I wanted not only to understand the biology, psychiatry, and public health failures, but also to be there for those in need in more than just an emotionally supportive role, the way I wish someone had been there for my friend. As an EMT, I’ve watched the realities of addiction unfold on the front lines. As a resident assistant for a college grappling with an overwhelming substance misuse crisis, evidenced by the Narcan stocked in every bathroom, I comforted a sobbing resident unfamiliar with substances when he found his roommate passed out on the ground. As a research assistant, I’ve learned about behavioral techniques to ease cigarette addiction and social and emotional learning as a means to instill resilience and mitigate risk factors. Through my experiences, as an EMT, a Crisis Text Line Counselor, and a D.O.P.E. squad member, I’ve encountered patients in every phase of this struggle: unconscious from an overdose, trembling through withdrawal, mentally toeing the line to seek help, or bravely sharing their recovery. I’ve learned that reversing an overdose is not the same as saving a life, but that it’s only the beginning. These moments have shown me that while my roles allowed me to step in during crises, I want to take on a more continuous, transformative role in patients’ lives as a physician who not only responds to the immediate crisis, but leads the healing, advocates for systemic change, and stays when the crisis subsides. Having experienced both the personal and professional sides of addiction, I want to be able to say I’ve done everything in my power to help patients, like my uncle and my friend, at their most vulnerable.

University instruction, for all its strengths, tends to follow a one-size-fits-all model. A single professor lectures to a room of a hundred or more students at one fixed pace, in one format, assuming everyone absorbs information the same way and at the same speed. But, students don't! Some need to see a process demonstrated; others need to hear it explained a second or third way; many simply need more time than a fifty-minute lecture allows. When the material moves faster than I can follow, no lecture hall can pause for me. Online resources can, and that flexibility is what has made them essential to how I learn. The platform I use most is YouTube. When a concept refuses to click in lecture, I turn to it to relearn the material at my own pace. Being able to pause, rewind, and hear the same idea explained several different ways has been invaluable for dense subjects like organic chemistry and physiology. What works for me might not work for the student sitting next to me, and that's exactly the point: online resources meet a broad range of learners where they are, offering visual breakdowns, worked examples, analogies, and step-by-step walkthroughs that a single lecture format can't. It has taught me that there is almost always another way to understand something I thought I couldn't. My favorites have been The Organic Chemistry Tutor for organic chemistry and calculus, Professor Dave Explains for general chemistry, and Crash Course for psychology and biology. As a premedical student, YouTube has also been immensely helpful for studying for the MCAT! As an EMT, much of my continuing education happens through online modules. My CEUs keep me current on protocols and skills, and because they're online, I can fit them around a full schedule of classes and shifts. These are the clearest example of online learning translating directly into application: what I review in a module one week, I may use on a real call the next, so the stakes of truly understanding the material are immediate and real. Learning at my own pace here isn't a convenience, as it's the difference between knowing a skill and merely having heard of it. Right now I'm also working through MedSchool Insiders' research course. Research is central to the career I want in medicine, yet it's rarely taught well in a standard classroom. The course fills that gap by walking me through how to get meaningfully involved, from finding projects to navigating study design and scientific writing. Rather than just consuming information, I'm learning the process of producing it, a skill I'll use throughout my training and career. What these resources share is that they don't only hand me information, but they help me apply it, and they do so in whatever form fits me best. A lecture has to teach to the average student, but my education doesn't have to end when the lecture does. By supplementing rigid, standardized instruction with flexible, self-directed tools, I can finally grasp a concept I once struggled with, perform a skill correctly in the field, or learn to contribute to research, all on my own terms. These platforms have made me a more independent and resourceful learner, which is exactly what medicine demands.

The thing I most want to build is a first-aid and CPR curriculum that treats life-saving knowledge as a right rather than a privilege. As a curriculum coordinator and trainer with MedicZero, I have spent the last few years helping develop, and now lead, an affordable, video-based first-aid program designed for high school students, and my goal is to build it into something that reaches the schools that need it most. I started this work because CPR education in schools is wildly inconsistent. Some schools skip it entirely. Many others "teach" it as a single lecture or video with no hands-on practice, yet compressions are a physical skill, and no one performs them well the first time on a real chest. Without manikins and guided practice, students walk away with a vague memory instead of the muscle memory that actually saves lives. The certified programs that do it right, like the American Heart Association's, require equipment, materials, and instructor training that underfunded schools simply cannot afford. The burden then falls on individual teachers to build a curriculum from scratch, on top of everything else they carry, and understandably, many never do. Our curriculum is designed to remove every one of those barriers. It is affordable enough for cash-strapped districts, structured around real hands-on practice rather than passive watching, and packaged so a teacher can deliver it without designing anything themselves. In other words, it gives under-resourced schools the same quality of training wealthier ones can buy, and hands overstretched teachers a ready-made tool instead of one more thing to invent. The stakes became real to me at a flea market in South Jersey, where a woman told me she had used a MedicZero training to perform CPR on her own sister-in-law. As an EMT, I have also watched families lose precious minutes because no one recognized a stroke or believed chest pain could be "slept off." The gap between tragedy and rescue is often just whether an ordinary person knew what to do. So, I am building toward a future where that knowledge is everywhere. We piloted the curriculum at Middlesex and Carteret High Schools, and I now lead a survey to identify underserved schools that lack effective first-aid education, so we can bring it where it will matter most. Every classroom we reach turns teenagers into people who can save a parent, a friend, or a stranger. For me, it is also the foundation of the physician I want to become, one who believes education and prevention belong at the center of medicine. In building this curriculum, I am building my own future: a career spent closing the gap between the people who hold life-saving knowledge and those who desperately need it.

Mental health became important to me as a student the way it does for most people: through loss. While I was in school, I watched my uncle disappear into addiction and lost a close friend, Rohit, to an overdose. Both struggles stayed largely invisible until they became impossible to ignore, and both taught me that students carry enormous private burdens while the world expects them to keep performing. I felt that weight myself, and I saw it all around me, in friends, in classmates, and later in the residents I was responsible for. I came to believe that mental health is not separate from being a student; it is the foundation that makes learning, growth, and sometimes survival possible. A student who is drowning emotionally cannot show up fully for anything else. That conviction is why I have spent so much of my time as a student building the kind of support I wish more people had. When the pandemic hit, I founded The Elysian Muse, a youth mental health literary magazine where young writers and artists could process stress through creative expression. We have published hundreds of creators around the world and built out advice articles and a dedicated mental health resources section, because I wanted struggling young people to find both a creative outlet and a clear path to help in the same place. Writing was how I processed my own family's pain; I even wrote a poetry book following a girl grappling with her father's addiction, and I wanted to offer others that same release. I have also tried to reach students before a crisis ever sets in. Through a social-emotional learning research lab, I helped design a mental health curriculum for special-education middle schoolers, a group especially at risk and especially overlooked. With The Elysian Muse, my team developed a one-week curriculum for elementary students and piloted it at a local school, making worry dolls and teaching young children that big feelings are normal and manageable. Early, age-appropriate education is some of the most powerful prevention there is. When students were already struggling, I tried to be the person who stayed. As a Crisis Text Line counselor, I talked teenagers through some of their hardest nights. As a resident assistant responsible for forty-five students, I responded to crises ranging from panic to thoughts of self-harm, and I made it my goal to be approachable enough that residents felt safe coming to me before things escalated. Advocacy, I learned, is not only programs and curricula; sometimes it is simply being someone a struggling person trusts enough to talk to. What connects all of this is a belief that mental health deserves the same seriousness, the same resources, and the same freedom from shame as physical health. As a student, I have tried to chip away at the silence around it: through a magazine, a classroom curriculum, a text conversation at midnight, an open door down the hall. I intend to carry that same commitment into medicine, where I hope to treat my patients' emotional lives as inseparable from their physical care, especially for the young people who too often suffer without anyone noticing.

I did not choose STEM out of pure curiosity. I chose it out of helplessness. Growing up, I watched my uncle disappear into addiction and later lost a close friend to an overdose, and in both cases I felt the particular agony of caring deeply about someone while having no idea how to actually help. Sympathy was not enough. I wanted the tools, the biology, the medicine, the evidence, to intervene rather than just grieve. Science became the place where my empathy could finally turn into action. That conviction has shaped every step since. As a research assistant, I studied the neuroscience of brain injury in neonatal models and behavioral techniques to ease nicotine addiction, and in a social-emotional learning lab I helped design a mental health curriculum for vulnerable middle schoolers. As an EMT, I learned to translate that knowledge into the back of an ambulance at three in the morning. STEM, I discovered, is not abstract; it is the difference between watching someone suffer and knowing what to do about it. That is why I am pursuing medicine: it is the clearest path I know from understanding to healing. Being a woman in this field gives that mission a particular shape. My cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-three, decades before anyone would have thought to screen her, and watching her navigate it showed me how often women's health is overlooked, under-researched, and dismissed as something to worry about "later." I have also seen, in clinic and on calls, how a frightened woman relaxes when someone takes her seriously and explains what is happening with patience rather than condescension. I want to be that physician, the one women trust with the concerns they have been taught to minimize, and one who pushes for the research and education women's health has long been denied. I also want to make a difference simply by being present and visible. STEM and medicine can feel impersonal, and in many corners they are still male-dominated. I have a younger sister, and I think often about the girls who quietly assume these fields are not for them. I want to show them otherwise: that you can be both empathetic and rigorous, that you can tear up on the drive home from a hard call and still be the most capable person in the room. Through mentorship, through the youth programs I have built, and eventually through the patients and trainees I work alongside, I want to widen the door I walked through. Ultimately, I see being a woman in STEM as carrying two responsibilities at once: mastering the science, and never letting the science crowd out the humanity that drew me to it. The biology of why people suffer matters enormously to me. So does the woman sitting on the exam table, the teenager texting a crisis line at midnight, and the little girl deciding whether someone like her belongs in medicine. I chose STEM to help people at their most vulnerable, and I intend to spend my career proving that a woman in this field can do both the hard science and the deeply human work that makes it worth doing.

To me, selflessness has never been about grand gestures. It is about staying: giving someone your full attention in the moment they need it most, even when it costs you something, and even when there is no guarantee it will turn out the way you hope. I learned this most sharply as a Crisis Text Line counselor. One Valentine's night, with hundreds of people waiting in the queue, I opened a conversation with a teenage girl who had just tried to end her life after a breakup. She had reached out because she did not want to be alone. For the next stretch of time, nothing else existed but her. I helped her wake her parents and stay calm, and I stayed with her, message after message, until emergency services reached her. I will never know the rest of her story, but I know that for those minutes she was not alone, and in that moment that was the only thing that mattered. That willingness to give without a guaranteed outcome has also defined my work as an EMT. On one call, my squad and two officers spent nearly half an hour gently trying to convince a young woman, "Sara," who had just survived an overdose, to come to the hospital and take a first step toward recovery. We left with nothing but a signed refusal form. We had given her everything we had and still could not reach her that night. Selflessness, I have learned, sometimes means pouring yourself into someone while knowing you may walk away with nothing to show for it, because the alternative, holding back, is unthinkable. As a resident assistant, helping someone in need often arrived without warning. I remember "Tara" knocking on my door in tears after a frightening encounter, one that later raised concerns about her wellbeing. I set aside my own night to sit with her, reassure her that she would be looked after, and make sure she felt safe in her own space. Responsible for forty-five residents at any given time, I came to understand selflessness as a quiet, constant readiness to put someone else's crisis ahead of my own plans. The same instinct shows up in smaller, less dramatic ways. As a hospital volunteer, my fellow volunteers and I made a habit of celebrating our patients' small victories, and I organized Valentine's goodie bags for the underprivileged children at our family health center. Through MedicZero, I taught strangers CPR and Narcan use, skills one woman later used to save her own sister-in-law. None of these acts asked for recognition; they asked only for my time and attention, freely given. What ties all of this together is a simple belief: the person in front of me matters more than my convenience, my schedule, or any reward. Whether it was a teenager in crisis at midnight, a frightened resident, or a patient I would never see again, I have tried to give fully and to stay present. That, to me, is what it means to embody selflessness, and it is exactly the kind of physician I intend to become.

My long-term goal is to become a pediatrician who serves underserved communities and treats youth mental and emotional health as inseparable from their physical care. Everything I've done points here: counseling teens on Crisis Text Line, founding a youth mental health magazine, building social-emotional curricula for special-education students, and treating pediatric patients as an EMT. I want to practice where the need is greatest, in a setting like Newark or a comparable community, and eventually pursue a focus in adolescent medicine and the behavioral-health side of pediatrics. The path is defined and the timing is concrete. I matriculate at New Jersey Medical School in summer 2026 and will complete my MD over four years (2026–2030), passing USMLE Step 1 after my second year and Step 2 during my third. Throughout, I plan to continue adolescent mental health research and seek clinical experience in underserved pediatric settings to build toward a competitive residency application. I will apply to pediatrics residency programs in 2029 for a 2030 start (three years), with a possible subsequent fellowship in adolescent medicine. Reaching these goals requires more than tuition. It requires strong faculty mentorship, research and volunteer opportunities, and, most critically, the financial stability to focus on training rather than survival. Medical students have little room to work, so funding largely determines whether I can devote myself fully to my education. The budget is the central challenge. New Jersey Medical School's cost of attendance is roughly $79,000 per year for in-state students, about $317,000 across four years, covering tuition, fees, housing, transportation, books, and living costs in Newark. My funding sources are mostly federal loans, now capped at $50,000 per year for professional students under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, totaling about $200,000 over four years. I intend to live as frugally as possible, continuing habits that kept my undergraduate debt low. Even in the best case, federal loans leave a gap of well over $100,000 across four years. Closing that gap is exactly what scholarship support is meant to do. I have thought through the alternative paths as well. If scholarship funding falls short, I will rely more heavily on private loans, apply for additional external scholarships each year, and try to look for more affordable housing near campus. In short, my goal is clear, my timeline is set, and my plan accounts for both the costs and the contingencies. Scholarship support would let me pursue it without compromising the focus and service that drew me to medicine in the first place.

My parents both come from Maharashtra: my mother from Mumbai and my father from the Nagpur region, where he grew up in a small village called Ratnapur. He shared a mud house with seven siblings, the children of a farmer who was perpetually in debt. It was not an easy childhood. One of his siblings died young from a snake bite, and two others died at birth. What changed the course of my father's life was his oldest sibling, who studied relentlessly, became an occupational therapist, and used that income to send my father and the younger children to school in the neighboring town of Verda once they finished grade school. My father took that chance seriously. He earned a degree in computer engineering and became the first person in his entire family to build a career abroad, eventually immigrating to New York City. I carry that history with me every day. My Indian background, and the specific story of my father's family, taught me that education is never something to take for granted; it is the thing my family fought and sacrificed to reach. The fact that I am matriculating into New Jersey Medical School in the summer of 2026 is only possible because of the people who came before me, several of whom never had the chance to pursue an education of their own. Their sacrifices are the reason I can pursue medicine, and they set the standard of hard work I hold myself to. That same determination has shaped how I've approached the cost of my own education. I attended Rutgers, my state school, to keep undergraduate tuition low, worked every summer, and became a Resident Assistant so that the housing, meal plan, and small monthly stipend that came with the role would offset my living expenses. I also earned the Rutgers SAS Excellence Scholarship each year based on merit. I have tried to limit my debt at every step. Medical school, however, presents a financial challenge I cannot meet on my own. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers beginning July 2026, exactly when I matriculate, and federal borrowing for professional students is now capped at $50,000 per year. Those federal loans will no longer stretch to cover my full cost of attendance. My school sits in Newark, a food desert where housing and transportation are costly, which only adds to the burden, and my family does not have the resources to bridge that gap. This scholarship would help close the distance between what I can borrow and what my education actually costs, and allow me to focus on becoming the physician my family's sacrifices have always pointed me toward. I would be deeply grateful for the support.

My father stood in my doorframe one afternoon and started reciting passwords. When I asked what he was doing, he told me to open the notes app on my phone and write everything down: where our bank accounts were, the login for our family Google Photos, account after account. I typed for a few seconds before I understood what he was actually doing. The sole breadwinner of our family, recently diagnosed with kidney cancer, was making sure that if he didn't survive, the rest of us would still be able to find our way through our own lives. I stopped typing. "There's no need," I told him, though we both knew that was a daughter's refusal, not a medical fact. He recovered, thankfully. But I have never forgotten the weight of standing in that doorway, watching someone I love quietly prepare to leave. That same fear returned in a different shape when my cousin was recently diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-four. She is barely older than I am, decades away from the age at which anyone would have thought to screen her, with her whole adult life still ahead of her on paper. The doctors gave her five years. She has decided not to spend them waiting. She still goes to work, still makes plans, still insists on living as normally as the disease will allow, and watching her do it has taught me more about courage than any classroom could. But it has also left me with a question I can't put down: how does a healthy young woman go from making weekend plans to counting years? And how many other young women are walking around right now with the same thing growing quietly inside them, simply because no one ever told them to look? That question is why breast health education matters so deeply to me. Breast cancer is so often framed as an older woman's concern that the women most able to catch it early in themselves, young women learning to know their own bodies, are frequently the least informed. Routine screening doesn't begin until decades into adulthood, which means that for someone my age, awareness and self-examination aren't a supplement to medical care; for a while, they are the only line of defense. Education is what fills that gap. It teaches a young woman what is normal for her body so she can notice when something changes. It gives her the language to bring a concern to a doctor and the confidence to insist on being taken seriously when she is told she is "too young to worry." Early detection is one of the few parts of this disease that ordinary people can actually influence, and education is the thing that makes that influence possible. As a woman with a sister, this isn't abstract for me. I think about the conversations my family never had, the self-checks no one taught us, the assumption that cancer was a thing that happened to other, older people until it was happening to us twice over. I think about how much of my father's terror in that doorway, and my cousin's quiet bravery now, comes down to timing, to how early something is caught and how prepared a family is to face it. I can't undo their diagnoses. But I can help make sure that the next young woman who feels something unusual knows exactly what to do with that feeling instead of brushing it aside. That impulse, to turn fear into something useful for other people, is also simply who I am. I founded a youth mental health magazine during the pandemic and built health-literacy curricula for children because I believe the most powerful thing you can give someone facing something frightening is knowledge they can act on. Breast health education is the same conviction pointed at a different fear. It is the difference between a young woman who notices a change and dismisses it and one who recognizes it, names it, and gets to a doctor in time. It is, in the most literal sense, the difference between five years and fifty. My cousin still goes to work every morning. My father is still here. Between the two of them, I have learned that cancer is not only a medical event but a family one, measured not just in treatments but in how ready and how informed the people around the patient are. I want to spend my life closing that information gap, especially for young women who have been taught that this could never be their story. Because it can be. It was ours. And the earlier we teach people to pay attention, the more of those stories will end the way my father's did, and the fewer will end the way I am terrified my cousin's might.

The toddler wanted nothing to do with my stethoscope. I had barely lifted it toward his chest before his face crumpled and the crying started, his mother bouncing him on her hip and apologizing while I still hadn't checked his ears, eyes, or nose. So I crouched down and asked if he liked Paw Patrol. He nodded, tears and all. I told him, very seriously, that we'd lost Marshall and I needed to check whether he was hiding in his ear. I promised I wouldn't hurt him, and he let me look. "Not in this one," I said. "Maybe the other?" By the time I'd checked both nostrils, his mouth, and finally guessed that "mommy must have him," he was laughing. That moment, on a call as an EMT, crystallized something I had been circling for years: caring for children is rarely about the clinical task alone. It's about earning trust on a child's terms, meeting them where they are, and understanding that a frightened kid needs a different kind of medicine than a frightened adult. Pediatric care asks for patience and imagination alongside competence, and I've found that I'm drawn to exactly that combination. That instinct has shaped every role I've taken with young people. As a Crisis Text Line counselor, I learned how high the stakes can be. On Valentine's night in 2022, with 300 texters in the queue, I opened a conversation with a teenage girl who had swallowed 18 pills after a breakup and texted because she didn't want to die alone. I helped her wake her parents and stay calm, and I stayed with her message by message until help arrived. I came away certain that a young person's mental health is not separate from their medical care; it is their care, and it deserves the same urgency. That conviction led me to build things. During the pandemic I founded The Elysian Muse, a youth mental-health literary magazine that has since published hundreds of young creators worldwide, and through it we developed a week-long resilience curriculum that we piloted with elementary students at Lincoln Elementary in New Brunswick, making worry dolls and talking about big feelings. The same questions drove my research at Rutgers, where I proposed and led a team developing a social-emotional learning supplement for middle-school special-education students. There I met "Manny," who refused to fill out his daily self-check-in form until weeks of patience and individual attention made him want to. Watching him come around taught me that trust, with vulnerable kids, is built slowly and is worth every minute. Shadowing a pediatrician confirmed what these experiences had been telling me. The best pediatricians blend scientific rigor with that same gentleness, treating the whole child and the family in the room. Pediatric medicine is the field that lets me be both people I've already learned to be: the one who finds Marshall in a toddler's ear, and the one who sits with a teenager through her darkest night. I want to spend my career caring for children at every level, the physical and the emotional alike, and to keep earning that trust one kid at a time.