My name is Marawan Abbas, and I’m a third-year medical student at Albany Medical College. As Joshua J. Marine once said, “Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” That quote has always stayed with me because my life has been shaped by challenges from being born and raised in Egypt to starting over in the United States eight years ago. Every obstacle I’ve faced has strengthened my purpose. I’ve come to believe that true happiness doesn’t come from personal success, but from helping others especially those who can’t help themselves. There’s a kind of joy I feel when I see someone smile because of something I did for them, and that feeling is what drives me every day. I know that life isn’t designed to be perfect or easy for everyone, but it’s those very struggles that give meaning to what we do. My dream is to become an internal medicine doctor and serve people in underserved and rural areas around the world. I want to open clinics that provide care either for free or at a very low cost. One of the biggest inspirations in my life is Dr. Mohamed Mashally, the “doctor of the poor” in Egypt. He dedicated his entire life to caring for those who couldn’t afford healthcare, charging almost nothing for his services. I hope to follow in his footsteps and carry his legacy forward in my own way. This scholarship would bring me closer to that goal. It would allow me to keep pushing forward and, eventually, use medicine to bring comfort and healing to those who need it most.