I have spent my life learning how to improvise, not as a musician, but in life. I had no instruction manual, no mentor to guide me through America’s complexities as a first-generation immigrant. I learned by experience, by instinct, and by making do with what was available. When my family came to the U.S., all we had was several suitcases and hope. We moved around a lot, crammed into relatives’ homes, switching schools, neighborhoods, and a language that I hardly knew. I became an expert at reading between the lines, filling in the meaning of words I didn’t know in English, nodding along in conversations where I had half the words but all of the meaning. I was, in every sense, a guinea pig: the first to navigate a foreign educational system, the first to apply to college without knowing what FAFSA was. Every mistake I made became a lesson for those who would follow. My parents, who had spent their youth working instead of studying, could not help with homework. So, I taught myself. I scoured library books, free online resources, and late night study sessions. I didn’t just learn English, I learned “how to learn” when no one was there to teach me. But, improvisation was not only about survival, it was my greatest strength. At Westminster Free Clinic, I took on a leadership position although I initially felt out of place. Managing interns, patient intakes, and assisting doctors made me work beyond my comfort zone. There was no script, there was no step-by-step guide for a first-gen student trying to balance ambition and financial hardship. But I thrived in the uncertainty, like I’ve always done—by doing and figuring it out along the way. One day, while on a trip back to Vietnam, I saw something that would change the way I viewed healthcare forever. Hundreds of children, their faces scarred by cleft palates, stood in a makeshift camp waiting for an operation that would transform their lives. In the U.S., cleft palate repair is a relatively simple procedure, performed on infants with little fanfare. But in Vietnam, children waited years, sometimes their whole lives, without getting it. I watched as doctors, who were overwhelmed and understaffed, tried to give patients life changing care. It was at that moment that I understood that improvisation should not be the way for healthcare, for something as basic as that. That was the moment that I decided that I was going to pursue public health and fight for healthcare accessibility. It is why I have dedicated my time at Westminster Free Clinic and it is why I want to further my education: so that I am not just someone who navigates the system, but someone who redesigns it—so that child in Vietnam, or here in the U.S., doesn’t have to stand in line for a surgery that should have been their right from birth. To me, higher education is not just getting a degree. It’s about proving that improvisation, resilience and resourcefulness can be as effective as privilege. It’s about taking everything I’ve learned from floating through life and applying it to something bigger—solving healthcare issues, advancing accessibility, and providing a blueprint for others, like me, with no direction. I don’t want to just survive the experiment. I want to redesign it entirely—so that those who come after me don’t have to improvise as much as I did. They will have a guide, a mentor, a path to follow. Being first-generation means starting from scratch, but it also means being the architect of something completely new.