Thank you.

Mental health is important to me as a student because I have watched what happens when it is ignored. I grew up in a Somali household where survival took priority over processing, where the weight of displacement, financial fear, and daily struggle was carried quietly because there was no space and no language to put it anywhere else. My mother fled war at thirteen and spent decades working three jobs and raising four children without anyone asking how she was doing underneath all of it. That silence was not weakness. It was a community that had never been given the tools to do anything differently. As a student navigating a rigorous academic path toward medicine, I feel the weight of that inheritance. The pressure to perform, to justify my presence in spaces I fought to enter, to carry the needs of my community while also managing my own, is real and constant. Mental health is not a peripheral concern for students like me. It is central to whether we make it through. When it goes unaddressed, people leave programs they belong in, careers that were meant to be theirs, rooms where their presence would have changed everything. I advocate for mental health in my community in a few ways, and not all of them are formal. The most consistent one is simply refusing to pretend that everything is fine when it is not. In Somali communities there is a long tradition of presenting strength because vulnerability has historically been dangerous. I try to model something different, naming difficulty out loud, talking about burnout, about the weight of being a first-generation student in predominantly white academic spaces, about what it costs to be constantly translating not just language but entire ways of being. When I do that in front of younger students or community members, something shifts. It gives people permission to do the same. In my role at the State of Minnesota working with adults with intellectual disabilities and serious mental health conditions, mental health advocacy became part of my daily work in a concrete way. I coordinated care plans, mentored staff in trauma-informed approaches, and sat with people navigating conditions that the system was often not equipped to meet with enough nuance or compassion. I watched what it looked like when mental health needs were addressed early and consistently, and I watched what happened when they were not. The difference was not subtle. My documentary project, Guri, which I am developing through my master’s program at Harvard, is also an act of mental health advocacy even if it does not use that language. The film centers Somali Minnesotans reflecting on what it feels like to live in a place that treats your belonging as conditional. The fear, hypervigilance, and erosion of trust that comes from that experience are mental health consequences. Documenting them is a way of saying they are real, they matter, and they deserve to be part of the conversation about what community health actually means. As a future physician I intend to carry this into clinical practice. Mental health cannot be a separate lane from the medicine I do. The patient in front of me is a whole person living inside a specific context, and ignoring that context does not make it go away. It just means the care I provide will be incomplete. Mental health matters to me as a student because I have seen, firsthand and repeatedly, that it is the difference between someone reaching their potential and being quietly worn down before they get there.

My awkward thing is that I have autism, and for a long time I experienced it exactly that way. As a kid it felt like everyone around me had received a script for how to move through the world and someone had forgotten to give me mine. Social cues that seemed obvious to others required active translation. I was always slightly outside a rhythm I could hear but not quite sync with. It was frustrating in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has never felt like the world was designed just slightly wrong for their brain. What changed was not the autism. It was my relationship to it. I stopped trying to perform neurotypicality and started paying attention to what my brain actually does well, which turns out to be quite a lot. I notice things other people walk past. I pick up on shifts in a room before anyone has said anything. I can sit with a patient and read what is underneath what they are saying, the fear behind clinical language, the exhaustion behind polite answers. That attentiveness is not separate from my autism. It is directly connected to it. The quirks are real and I have made peace with all of them. I eat the same Wendy’s Biggie Bag almost every day because when something works I see no reason to introduce unnecessary variables. I hate silence and have been known to make noise in quiet rooms just to correct the situation. I twist my fingers when I am thinking, which is constantly. And I learn languages for fun, not for any practical reason, just because the way different languages carve up the world reveals something interesting about how meaning works. I am on my fourth. What I want people to understand is that the things that made me feel out of place as a kid are the same things that make me effective now. The hyperfocus that felt like an obstacle made me a thorough researcher at the Mayo Clinic and a careful advocate for patients who needed someone to stay until the problem was actually solved. The pattern recognition that made social situations feel like decoding exercises prepared me to notice, in a dataset or a treatment plan or a room full of people, exactly what everyone else had glossed over. I spent years feeling like my brain was working against me. It was just a different instrument, and I had to learn how to play it. The liberation I feel now is not about having figured everything out. I still stim in quiet rooms and eat the same meal and lose track of conversations that move too fast. But I stopped experiencing those things as failures and started experiencing them as just true. This is how I am wired, and it has taken me to Harvard, through research labs, and into clinical spaces where my particular way of paying attention has made a real difference. The script everyone else had was never going to work for me anyway. It turns out I did not need it.

The thing I am most committed to building is a version of medicine that actually reaches the people who need it most. That sounds broad until you understand where it comes from. I grew up watching my mother navigate a healthcare system that was not built for her. She had fled war in Somalia, worked three jobs, and raised four children, and there were still moments where the people responsible for her care made her feel invisible. I was nine years old the first time I sat in a clinic exam room and translated between her and a doctor who spoke in a language she could not follow. When she finally understood what was being said, something in her face changed. I watched fear leave a person’s body in real time and I have never forgotten what caused it. It was not the medicine. It was being heard. That moment is what I am building toward, at scale and with staying power. Right now I am completing my master’s degree at Harvard in Media, Medicine, and Health, where I am developing a documentary film called Guri, which means home in Somali. It centers members of the Somali Minnesotan community reflecting on belonging, fear, and what happens to people’s health when the place they call home treats them as temporary. That film is one part of what I am building. The other part is a medical career rooted in community practice, working with low-income, immigrant, and uninsured patients in the spaces where care is hardest to access and most needed. What I am building is not a single thing. It is a body of work that treats storytelling and medicine as connected rather than separate, because I believe they are. Narrative shapes who gets believed in a clinic. It shapes whose pain is taken seriously and whose community is funded and whose research questions get asked. I have spent years learning how those systems work from the inside, through clinical research at the Mayo Clinic, through street medicine work in Los Angeles, through direct care roles with some of the most vulnerable populations in Minnesota. Each experience has added something to what I understand about the gap between what medicine offers and who actually receives it. The positive impact I hope to make is not abstract. It is the Somali mother whose hands stop shaking once someone explains her child’s treatment plan in a language she understands. It is the patient who finally follows through on care because someone made the system feel safe enough to trust. It is the research that gets designed to include the communities it claims to serve. I am building a future where those outcomes are not exceptions. Where they are just what good medicine looks like. I have been working toward that since I was nine years old in that exam room, and I am not close to done.

I first encountered transverse myelitis not in a textbook but in a patient. I was doing clinical work and met someone navigating the aftermath of a TM diagnosis, managing the uncertainty of a condition that had arrived without warning and reshaped their daily life in ways that were still unfolding. What struck me was not just what they were dealing with physically, but how they were dealing with it. They were thoughtful, specific, and completely clear-eyed about what had changed and what had not. They had not organized their life around the diagnosis. They had reorganized their understanding of themselves around what they still wanted to do. That encounter stayed with me, and I brought it into my coursework. Studying the neurological mechanisms of transverse myelitis deepened something I had been circling for years in my academic and clinical work: the relationship between the body, the systems built to support it, and the person living inside both. TM sits at a complicated intersection. It is rare enough that patients often spend significant time without answers, navigating a medical system that is not always equipped to meet them with clarity. It disproportionately affects Black patients, a fact I filed alongside everything else I have learned about who bears the heaviest burden in conditions that do not receive proportionate research attention or resources. What has been a source of positivity for me in engaging with transverse myelitis, both through that patient encounter and through my subsequent learning, is what it clarified about the kind of physician I want to become. Conditions like TM demand that a doctor be comfortable with uncertainty, that they can hold a patient’s fear without rushing to resolve it prematurely, and that they can communicate honestly even when the answers are incomplete. The patient I met modeled that kind of engagement from their side of the exam table. They asked precise questions. They pushed back gently when something did not feel right. They treated their own care as a collaboration rather than a handoff. I wanted to be worthy of that. That encounter also reinforced for me how much the experience of diagnosis and ongoing management is shaped by factors outside the clinic. Whether a patient has someone who can advocate for them, whether they have the resources to access specialists, whether the medical team around them understands the full context of their life, all of it determines outcomes in ways that pure clinical competence cannot account for alone. I grew up watching my mother navigate healthcare systems that were not built for her, and every clinical experience I have since then has been filtered through that understanding. Transverse myelitis, with its complexity and its tendency to fall through diagnostic gaps, made that understanding sharper. The positivity I take from it is not a soft kind. It is not inspiration in the way that word is sometimes used carelessly when talking about people managing illness. It is something more specific: a clarification of purpose. Meeting someone who was living thoughtfully inside a difficult diagnosis reminded me that medicine at its best is not something done to a patient. It is something built with them. I am pursuing medicine because I want to be that kind of physician in every room I enter, not only in the dramatic moments but in the ordinary ones where someone is quietly trying to make sense of what is happening to their body. That patient helped me see it more clearly. I am grateful for that.

Leadership, in my experience, is not about being the loudest person in the room. It is about being the one who notices what the room is missing and decides to do something about it. I learned this early. When I was nine years old, I sat with my mother in a clinic exam room and watched a doctor speak at her in a language she could not follow. No one else in that room moved to bridge the gap. I did. I asked her in Somali where it hurt, and the moment she understood that someone was actually with her, something in her face changed. I did not have a title. I had no authority. I just saw what was needed and stepped into it. That is still how I understand leadership. The through line of every role I have held since then has been the same: identify the gap, and close it. At the Mayo Clinic, when a research partner left our pancreatic cancer device project, my team encouraged me to drop the equity component to lighten the load. I looked at the NIH data instead. Black patients carried the highest burden of pancreatic cancer, yet as the device was designed, they would not have been eligible for it. I refused to let that stand. I restructured the commercialization strategy around Medicaid reimbursement pathways and safety net hospital adoption, and I presented those findings to faculty. Leadership in that moment was not dramatic. It was insisting on something that mattered when it would have been easier to let it go. At Occidental College I founded the Student Health Equity Initiative because pre-med students from underrepresented backgrounds at my institution had no organized support. I built it from nothing, secured funding, organized workshops on MCAT preparation and health disparities, and created a space that did not exist before I decided it should. At InciSioN Sudan I served as Secretary General, organizing surgical workshops and campaigns for aspiring surgeons across the country. At the State of Minnesota I led care planning for adults with intellectual disabilities and serious mental health conditions, mentoring staff and advocating for populations who had very little power to advocate for themselves. In each case the leadership looked different on the surface, but underneath it was the same impulse: someone needs something, a structure is not providing it, and I am in a position to change that. What makes me a leader is not ambition, though I have that too. It is the combination of attention and follow-through. I notice things other people walk past. I notice when a patient’s hands are shaking over a treatment plan and no one on the care team has slowed down enough to see it. I notice when a research design excludes the very population it is supposed to serve. I notice when a student is struggling in a system that was not built for them. And then I do not just note it and move on. I stay. I build. I insist. I also lead by being present in a way that makes other people feel less alone in difficult situations. Some of the most important leadership I have done has happened in one-on-one moments, sitting with an unhoused woman in Los Angeles who needed someone to stay with her during a medical visit, or walking a Somali mother through a treatment plan until the fear left her face. Leadership at scale starts with leadership in small rooms, and I have never considered one more important than the other.

My academic and career goals are rooted in a single conviction that has been forming since I was nine years old, sitting in a clinic exam room translating for my mother, watching fear leave her face the moment she finally understood what was being said to her. I have spent my entire life learning, in different contexts and at different scales, that access to care and the ability to navigate the systems built around it matter as much as the medicine itself. Everything I am working toward is an extension of that understanding. I am currently completing my Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, where I am developing a documentary film called Guri, which means home in Somali. The film centers Somali Minnesotans reflecting on belonging, displacement, and what happens to a community’s health when its stability is repeatedly questioned in public discourse. It sits at the intersection of storytelling and social medicine, and it represents my belief that narrative shapes health outcomes in ways the field has not fully reckoned with. I expect to complete the program in spring 2027. From there, my goal is medical school and a career in community medicine. I want to practice with low-income, immigrant, and uninsured populations, the communities I come from and have spent my life advocating for in different capacities. I have worked as a behavioral therapist, a personal care assistant, a street medicine research intern, a designated coordinator for adults with intellectual disabilities, and a research scholar at the Mayo Clinic, where I restructured a commercialization strategy for a pancreatic cancer device to account for the fact that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would not have been eligible under the original design. Every role has taught me something about the gap between what medicine offers and who actually receives it. As a physician, I want to close that gap. Not abstractly, but in exam rooms, on phone calls, in the language a patient actually speaks, with the kind of presence that makes someone feel safe enough to tell the truth about what is happening in their body. I understand what it took for certain patients to walk through the door because I watched my mother walk through those doors, and I watched what happened when no one on the other side was ready to receive her. My longer-term goals extend beyond clinical practice into research and policy. My background in health data analytics, epidemiology, and equity research has shown me that structural decisions, about reimbursement pathways, about who gets included in a study, about which communities a device is designed to serve, determine who benefits from medical advancement long before care reaches a patient. I want to continue influencing those decisions, through research, through the kind of documentary work I am doing now, and eventually through the authority that comes with being a physician who has spent years inside these systems. I am applying for this scholarship because the path I am building is long and the financial weight of it is real. I have been fortunate to receive support from organizations that believe in students like me, and I supplement that with income from my current position as an Advisory Analyst at Optum. But every scholarship I receive creates more room to do this work fully, without the constant calculation of what I can and cannot afford to pursue. My goals have never been in question. The resources to reach them always have been. This scholarship would be one more thing that closes that distance.

My academic and professional goals have always been rooted in the same question: who gets left out, and what can I do about it? I am currently completing my master’s degree at Harvard in Media, Medicine, and Health, where I am developing a documentary about Somali Minnesotans and the psychological consequences of living in a community whose belonging is constantly questioned. From there, my goal is medical school and a career in community medicine, practicing with low-income, immigrant, and uninsured populations who navigate systems that were not built for them. I grew up translating for my mother in clinic rooms, fighting with hospitals over bills my family could not pay, and learning that being heard is its own form of medicine. I want to be the physician who already understands what it took for a patient to walk through the door. I need this scholarship because the path I am on is expensive and the financial reality of graduate school followed by medical school is something I manage carefully every single day. I have been fortunate to receive support from organizations like UNCF and others, and I supplement that with income from my job as an Advisory Analyst at Optum. But there is always a gap. Every scholarship I receive is one less dollar borrowed, one less weight carried into residency, one more degree of freedom to practice medicine in communities that cannot afford to pay top dollar for care. This scholarship would be one more thing that makes the path sustainable. Heavy metal found me at a time when I needed something that did not ask me to be okay. I grew up in a household shaped by survival, by the kind of quiet endurance that does not leave room for processing difficulty out loud. I had a hard time finding my voice, understanding where I ended and other people’s expectations began, and learning that it was not only acceptable but necessary to take up space. Setting boundaries felt impossible for a long time. Soft music told me to feel better. Metal did not. Metal sat in the anger and the confusion with me and made it feel like something I could survive rather than something I needed to hide. Five Finger Death Punch became important to me specifically because of “Never Enough.” That song articulates something I lived for years before I had language for it: the exhaustion of trying to meet an impossible standard, the frustration of giving everything and watching it still fall short, and underneath all of it, a refusal to disappear. Listening to it was the first time I felt like the difficult parts of my interior life were not shameful. They were just true. That shift mattered more than I can fully explain. It gave me permission to stop managing myself so carefully and start actually knowing myself. Other bands that have stayed with me include Disturbed and Bring Me the Horizon, both of whom write about internal struggle in ways that feel honest rather than performative. What I love about metal broadly is that it does not flinch. It goes directly at the hardest things and does not dress them up. That directness is something I have tried to carry into my own work and voice. My favorite concert experience was seeing Five Finger Death Punch live and standing in a crowd of people who were all, in their own way, there for the same reason. There is something about a metal crowd that feels like collective permission. Everyone in that room had something they were working through, and the music held all of it without judgment. I had spent a lot of my life being the person who held space for others. That night I got to just be in it. Metal taught me that having a voice means using it even when, especially when, it is uncomfortable. That is still one of the most important things I know.

I chose to pursue medicine because of a moment when I was nine years old, sitting in a clinic exam room with my mother. She had fled war in Somalia at thirteen, worked three jobs, and raised four children, and I had never seen her look small until that day. The doctor spoke in a language she could not follow, and I watched her shrink. I asked her in Somali where it hurt, and the moment she understood that someone in that room could actually hear her, something in her face changed. That was when I understood that medicine is not only about treatment. It is about whether a person feels safe enough to be treated at all. That understanding has only deepened since. At fourteen I was hospitalized with pneumonia and listened from my bed as relatives whispered about a twenty thousand dollar bill. My mother went quiet on the phone. After discharge I became the one making calls to hospitals and state offices, navigating systems that were not built for families like ours. When our Medicaid approval finally came, my mother and I read the letter together and cried. That was the day I understood that access to care and the ability to navigate the system around it are just as important as the medicine itself. I chose healthcare because every experience I have had, whether as a patient, a caregiver, a researcher, or an advocate, has confirmed that the communities I come from need physicians who already understand what it took to walk through the door. My patients will not have to explain their fear to me. I will already know it. As a woman pursuing medicine, and specifically as a Black Somali-American woman, I am aware that my presence in clinical spaces carries meaning beyond my individual career. When I walked into a room with an unhoused Somali woman at Children’s Dental Services whose hands were shaking over a treatment plan, the shift that happened when she realized I spoke her language was not small. It changed the entire encounter. Representation in healthcare is not symbolic. It is clinical. It affects whether patients disclose symptoms, whether they follow through on treatment, whether they trust the system enough to return. I have also seen what happens when equity is not centered in healthcare research and design. At the Mayo Clinic I worked on a commercialization project for a pancreatic cancer device and found that Black patients, who carry the highest prevalence of that disease, would not have been eligible for the device as it was originally designed. I restructured the strategy around Medicaid reimbursement pathways and safety net hospital adoption. A team can do everything right scientifically and still build something that fails the people who need it most. I was not willing to let that happen, and I will bring that same insistence into every room I enter as a physician. The positive impact I hope to make is not abstract. I want to practice in the communities that interact with medical systems the least, the low-income, the immigrant, the uninsured, the people who delay care not because they do not want it but because they have learned that seeking it comes with risk. I want to be the physician who already speaks the language, literally and structurally, of the people sitting across from me. Being a woman in healthcare means I have had to insist on being taken seriously in spaces that were not always designed to include me. I have learned that the insistence is the job. I plan to keep doing it.

The mental health experiences that have shaped me most are not my own. They belong to the people I grew up watching carry things that had no name in our community, and to the patients I have sat with who needed someone to simply stay in the room. My mother worked three jobs and raised four children after fleeing war in Somalia. She did not talk about what that had cost her. In our community, you did not. There was no framework for it, no language that made it safe to say that surviving something did not mean you had recovered from it. I watched her move through the world in a way that looked like strength from the outside, and I understood even as a child that something heavier was underneath it. The silence was not absence. It was weight. That silence became familiar to me in other ways. When I was fourteen and hospitalized with pneumonia, I heard relatives whispering about the cost of my care like it was a death sentence. My mother went quiet on the phone when I told her. I did not have words then for what I was watching, but I knew that financial terror and health fear and grief were all tangled together in that silence, and that none of them were being addressed by anyone in that hospital. Years later, working with a street medicine team in Los Angeles, I sat with an unhoused woman who was pregnant and terrified. She told me she had been hurt by clinicians before and did not trust the healthcare system. She opened up to me because I was a Black woman like herself, she said, and because something about the way I approached her felt safe. What she was describing was not just distrust. It was a mental health reality shaped by repeated harm, by systems that had failed her, by the accumulated weight of being unseen. I stayed with her through her visit. We made a list of resources together so she had something concrete to hold. When I saw her again, something in her had shifted. I now work with adults with intellectual disabilities and serious mental health conditions at the State of Minnesota. Many of the people I serve live with the ongoing stress of a political climate that has made them afraid to go to appointments, afraid to move through public spaces, afraid of what might happen simply by existing outside. Mental health does not exist separately from the environment a person lives in. I see that every day. What all of these experiences have taught me is that mental health is often communal before it is individual. The fear my mother carried was shaped by war, displacement, poverty, and a healthcare system that did not speak her language. The distrust that woman in Los Angeles felt was built over years of real harm. The anxiety my clients carry is being generated in real time by real threats. Understanding that has changed how I think about care. I want to be a physician who treats the person in front of me without separating their mental and physical health, and without pretending that those experiences exist in a vacuum. The mental health impacts I have witnessed and absorbed have not broken me. They have clarified exactly what kind of doctor I am trying to become, one who understands that being heard and being safe are not soft additions to medicine. They are the foundation of it.

My first language is Somali. I grew up speaking it at home with my mother, who fled war in Somalia at thirteen and raised four children in Minnesota while working multiple jobs. English came quickly once I started school, but Somali stayed the language of our home, our phone calls, our arguments, and our most important conversations. The challenges of being bilingual showed up early and in ways I did not expect. The hardest part was not learning English. It was learning to move between two languages without losing something in the translation. There are things my mother says in Somali that have no clean English equivalent, feelings and expressions that exist in one world and dissolve in another. As a child I sometimes felt stuck between them, not fully fluent in the emotional register of either language depending on the context. In school I learned to code switch constantly, adjusting how I spoke based on who was in the room, which is exhausting in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has never had to do it. There was also a particular weight that came with being the one who translated for my family. I was nine years old the first time I sat in a clinic exam room with my mother and translated between her and a doctor who spoke only in medical terminology. I did not fully understand what he was saying either, but I understood fear, and I understood that my mother needed someone to make sense of what was happening to her body. That responsibility never fully left me. For years I was the one on phone calls with hospitals, insurance offices, and government agencies, translating not just language but entire systems for a family trying to navigate them. The benefits, though, are real and they run deep. Being bilingual made me a more careful listener. When you grow up translating, you learn to pay attention to what someone is actually trying to communicate, not just the words they are using. You get better at reading tone, filling gaps, and noticing when something important is being left out. That skill has shaped how I work with patients, how I approach research, and how I think about health equity. Language access is not a minor logistical detail in healthcare. It is often the difference between someone understanding their diagnosis or leaving a clinic confused and too embarrassed to ask again. Somali also gave me community in rooms where I would have otherwise been alone. Whenever I have walked into a space and heard Somali being spoken, or been able to speak it with a patient or a family, there is an immediate shift. Trust moves faster. People open up. In clinical settings I have watched that happen firsthand, and it has confirmed for me that language is not just communication. It is safety. My plans post-graduation are to attend medical school and practice community medicine with a focus on immigrant and low-income populations, the communities I grew up in. I am currently completing my master’s degree at Harvard in Media, Medicine, and Health, where I am developing a documentary about Somali Minnesotans and the health consequences of narrative instability. That work sits at the intersection of everything I care about: storytelling, structural equity, and the connection between how communities are talked about and how they are treated. Being bilingual is central to all of it. My first language taught me that being heard is its own form of medicine. That is what I am trying to provide.

The challenge is called The Pitch, and I think it would be one of the most revealing things Love Island has ever done. Here is how it works. Each islander has to create a dating profile for their partner from scratch, without their partner’s help or input. They get a tablet, thirty minutes, and access to a photo selection from the villa’s camera roll. They have to write a bio, choose three photos, pick the opening line their partner would send to a stranger, and select one dealbreaker their partner has that they are willing to honestly disclose. When time is up, each islander stands in front of the villa and presents the profile they made, while their partner sits on the couch and reacts in real time hearing it all for the first time. The other islanders then vote by physically walking to stand behind whichever couple they think made the most accurate and genuinely loving profile. Not the funniest, not the most flattering. The most true. The couple with the most islanders standing behind them wins a date, planned entirely around details from the winning bio. What makes this challenge different from the standard compatibility tests is that it flips the pressure. Usually the questions are about preferences, favorite foods, who takes longer to get ready. This one asks something harder: can you see your partner clearly enough to represent them honestly, and do you care about them enough to make that honesty feel like a gift rather than an exposure? The photo selection alone would cause drama. Choosing three photos out of everything available means making real decisions about how you see someone. Do you pick the ones where they look best, or the ones that actually capture who they are? Do those overlap? What does it mean if they do not? The bio portion is where people would either rise or fall. Writing about someone you have feelings for, in the voice of that person trying to attract a stranger, requires a specific kind of attention. You have to know how they talk, what they value, what they lead with when they are trying to be liked. Getting it wrong, even slightly, would be visible immediately. The dealbreaker disclosure is the part I love most. Every person in that villa has something. Maybe they are messy, or they need constant reassurance, or they go quiet when they are stressed instead of talking about it. Naming it honestly means you have noticed it, accepted it, and decided it does not change how you feel. That is intimacy. Watching someone acknowledge their partner’s real flaw and frame it without cruelty would tell you everything about where that couple actually stands. The reaction moments would be television gold. Someone tearing up because their partner captured something they had never said out loud. Someone trying to laugh off a bio that missed the mark completely. A couple realizing, in front of everyone, that one of them has been paying much more attention than the other. Love Island at its best is not about the games. It is about what the games accidentally reveal. The Pitch would not feel like a competition. It would feel like a series of small confessions, disguised as a challenge, happening all at once. The winning couple gets a date. But honestly, everyone watching would leave knowing more about every couple in that villa than an hour of regular episodes could show.

I became a real fan of Sabrina Carpenter during a stretch of my life when I was questioning whether I was doing things in the right order. I was transferring schools, reworking my path to medicine, and watching people around me hit milestones I felt like I should have already reached. I stumbled onto an interview where she talked about her mom always calling her the tortoise, being told to just chill and trust the pace. She said it used to annoy her, but that it turned out to be the most useful thing anyone ever told her. I listened to that and felt something loosen in my chest. What I appreciate most is that her success did not come from erasing the earlier versions of herself. She released five albums before most people knew her name. She kept writing, kept touring, kept building something real even when the numbers were not there to validate it. A lot of people in her position would have pivoted or chased whatever was working for someone else. She did not. She kept being exactly herself until the world caught up. I grew up as a first-generation Somali-American navigating institutions that were not designed with people like me in mind. I translated for my mother in clinic rooms when I was nine. I spent years making phone calls, filling out forms, explaining our lives to systems that responded slowly if at all. I learned early that the work you do quietly, before anyone is watching, is often the most important work. That is what I see in Sabrina’s career too. She was in rooms where people had opinions about whether her music had what it needed. She heard it, kept writing anyway, and can now talk about it with humor and without bitterness. That takes a specific kind of discipline that does not get talked about enough. The humor is part of what draws me in. She is genuinely funny, but there is always something underneath it. “Please Please Please” is a funny song and also a vulnerable one. She makes ordinary moments feel worth noticing, and that skill transfers. In the work I do, whether sitting with a patient or advocating for someone who has been overlooked, paying attention to small specific details and treating them as meaningful is everything. There is also something about the way she handled being underestimated that I keep coming back to. She mentioned that people told her her music lacked symmetry. She named that fear directly and moved past it, without making bitterness the center of her story. I recognize that. As a Black woman pursuing medicine, I have been in spaces where my belonging was quietly questioned. The choice each time is whether to shrink or to keep building. Sabrina kept building. Her career has reminded me that the timeline matters less than the direction. You can spend years being overlooked and come out the other side clear about who you are, without apology and without resentment. When “Espresso” came out and she was suddenly everywhere, it did not feel like a new person had appeared. It felt like the same person had finally been seen. That is what I am working toward in my own life, not a sudden arrival, but enough consistency that when the moment comes, it is obvious I was always heading there. She got there by being the tortoise. I understand that now more than I ever have.

Taylor’s 2019 American Music Awards performance is the one I keep coming back to. If you remember what was happening that year, you know why it mattered. She had been publicly told she could not perform her own catalog. Songs she had written as a teenager, songs she had poured herself into, were being used as leverage against her. Most people in that position would have found a workaround, kept it quiet, and moved on. Instead, she walked onto that stage and performed a medley of her entire career anyway, opening with a tribute to her own history like she was daring anyone to stop her. She was not asking for permission. She was not waiting to be told she belonged there. She just showed up and took up space. I think about that night a lot because I understand, in a different way, what it feels like to fight for something that should have never been taken in the first place. I grew up translating for my mother in clinic exam rooms. She had fled war in Somalia, worked three jobs, and raised four kids, and there were still moments where the system made her feel like she did not exist. I was nine years old the first time I watched a doctor speak at her instead of to her, and I watched her shrink. When I asked her in Somali where it hurt, something shifted in her face. She was finally heard. That moment stayed with me because I realized being heard is its own kind of medicine. Years later, when I was fourteen and sick with pneumonia, I listened from my hospital bed while relatives whispered about a twenty thousand dollar bill like it was a death sentence. My mother went silent on the phone when I told her. That silence scared me more than anything else. After I was discharged, I became the one making the calls, pleading with hospitals and state offices, trying to convince them we were real people who could not pay what they were asking. When the Medicaid approval letter came, my mother and I read it together and cried. That is the kind of fight I know. Not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that happens on hold lines and in waiting rooms and in languages that institutions do not want to accommodate. The kind where you have to insist, over and over, that you exist and that you deserve care. Taylor standing on that stage in 2019 was not the same fight. I know that. But there is something in the image of a person being told they cannot claim what is theirs, and choosing to claim it anyway, that cuts across a lot of different experiences. She did not wait for the system to be fixed before she showed up. She showed up anyway and made it impossible to look away. That is what moved me. Not just the performance itself, which was genuinely stunning, but what it represented. The refusal to be erased. The decision to treat your own story as worth telling even when powerful people have decided otherwise. The Life of a Showgirl honors that same spirit. It is an album about someone who has been through public scrutiny, loss, and reinvention, and has come out the other side choosing joy and ownership over bitterness.

Calculus is the language underneath everything in STEM. It describes how things change, how systems behave over time, and how forces interact in ways that static equations cannot capture. For a field built on understanding complex, dynamic processes, including biological systems, disease progression, drug interactions, and population health trends, calculus is not a prerequisite to get through. It is a fundamental way of thinking that shapes how STEM professionals approach problems. In medicine and biological research specifically, calculus appears in ways that are not always obvious but are always consequential. Pharmacokinetics, the study of how drugs move through the body, depends on differential equations to model absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination. Epidemiological modeling of disease spread, including the kinds of models that informed public health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic, relies on calculus to describe rates of transmission and recovery over time. Medical imaging technologies including MRI and CT scans are built on mathematical transformations rooted in calculus. When a physician reads a scan or interprets a pharmacological dosing curve, the mathematics underneath that interpretation traces back to the concepts calculus teaches. Beyond its direct applications, calculus trains a particular kind of thinking that STEM fields depend on. It teaches you to reason about rates of change rather than fixed states, to think about systems as dynamic rather than static, and to tolerate and work through complexity rather than simplify it away prematurely. These are not just mathematical skills. They are scientific habits of mind that carry into research design, clinical reasoning, and problem solving at every level. As someone pursuing medicine with a focus on health equity and research, I have seen how quantitative reasoning shapes the questions we can ask and the conclusions we can draw. At the North Star STEM Alliance, I used statistical and mathematical tools to analyze correlations between race, income, and diabetes prevalence in Minnesota. At the Mayo Clinic, I worked with biological data to evaluate cancer cell viability and biomarker responses, applying the kind of analytical reasoning that calculus builds. The ability to think precisely about change and relationship, which is what calculus trains, made me a more rigorous researcher and a more careful interpreter of data. There is also something worth naming about who has traditionally had access to calculus instruction. Advanced mathematics courses are distributed unevenly across schools, with under-resourced schools and majority-minority districts less likely to offer calculus at all. This means the gateway to STEM is partially constructed from a subject that not every student has equal access to. Closing that gap matters not just for individual students but for the diversity and quality of the STEM workforce. A field that excludes students who never had the chance to take calculus is a field that loses the perspectives and talents of entire communities. Calculus is important in STEM because it builds the analytical foundation the field runs on, and because access to it determines, in part, who gets to be part of the field at all.

I have been drawn to children my entire life, but the moment that made pediatric medicine feel like a calling happened at Children’s Dental Services in Minneapolis. A Somali mother came in with her toddler who needed emergency surgery for extensive tooth decay. The dental team called me in to translate. When I walked into the room, she was holding the treatment plan and her hands were shaking. Her son was small and scared and did not understand what was happening. She did not understand what was happening either. The moment she realized someone on the team could understand her, something shifted in her face. I walked through every step of the plan with her alongside the dentist. By the end, she asked if I could stay involved through the whole process. Her son looked at me the way children look at someone they have decided to trust. I drove home that day thinking about what it means for a child to receive care in a room where no one speaks their family’s language. Children absorb their caregivers’ fear. When a parent is confused and afraid, a child feels that. When a parent finally understands and relaxes, a child feels that too. The quality of pediatric care is inseparable from the quality of communication with families, and the quality of communication with families depends on whether providers understand the communities they serve. My interest in pediatric medicine also grew from my work as a Behavioral Therapist at Partners in Excellence, where I delivered ABA therapy to children ages four through nine with autism spectrum disorder. I designed individualized behavior intervention strategies, tracked developmental progress, and coached families in reinforcing skills at home. Working with children who communicated differently required me to become a more patient, attentive, and creative clinician. I learned to read nonverbal cues, celebrate incremental progress, and adapt my approach in real time. Children taught me to slow down in ways that adult-focused clinical settings do not always demand. I am pursuing medicine with a focus on serving immigrant and underserved communities, and children are among the most vulnerable members of those communities. Pediatric health disparities are some of the most consequential because the conditions that shape a child’s health, housing instability, food insecurity, parental fear of immigration enforcement, lack of language-concordant care, follow children for the rest of their lives. Addressing those disparities early is one of the highest-leverage interventions medicine can offer. At Children’s Dental Services I learned that a child’s health begins with their parent’s ability to understand what is happening and trust the people in the room. I want to be a physician who earns that trust, who speaks the community’s language literally or figuratively, and who understands that caring for a child means caring for the family and community that holds them. Pediatric medicine is where I can do the most good for the communities I come from. That is why I am pursuing it.

No one in my family had been to college in the United States. There was no roadmap, no one to call when the financial aid portal broke, no one who knew the difference between a subsidized and unsubsidized loan or why it mattered. I entered higher education the way my mother entered this country: with determination, without a guide, and with the understanding that figuring it out was not optional. I am a second-generation Somali-American. My mother fled civil war at thirteen and built a life in Minnesota through sheer will and relentless work. She taught me that stability is something you construct, not something you inherit. What she could not teach me was how to navigate an academic system she had never been inside. That part I had to learn alone, and learning it alone shaped everything about who I am becoming and what I intend to do with my education. Being an outsider to the system means you spend significant energy on things other students do not have to think about. It means researching scholarship opportunities independently because no parent has done it before you. It means learning to read a financial aid award letter without anyone to explain it. It means working jobs alongside your coursework not for spending money but for rent and family expenses. It means that when I lost my cousin and became the legal immigration sponsor for my family, I paused my education not because I wanted to but because the eldest daughter carries what needs to be carried. When I returned, I carried a sharper sense of purpose. Despite these barriers, I graduated summa cum laude in Biology from Augsburg University with a 3.95 GPA, conducted independent research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic Innovation Scholars Program, and earned admission to Harvard University’s Master of Science program in Media, Medicine, and Health. I did not achieve these things in spite of my background. I achieved them because my background gave me a clarity of purpose that I do not think can be replicated any other way. Being an outsider to the system also taught me what the system looks like from the outside, which turns out to be the most important thing I can bring to medicine. I know what it costs a family to navigate a hospital bill alone. I know what it feels like to be in a room where the language of the institution is not your first language. I know the specific fear of not knowing whether you belong somewhere, and the specific relief of finding someone who makes you feel like you do. My future goals are shaped entirely by this experience. I want to become a physician who practices in immigrant and underserved communities, conduct research on structural barriers to healthcare access, and build an immigrant health equity institute that does for communities what no institution did for my family: meets people where they are and helps them find their way through. I did not enter higher education with a map. I am making one, so others do not have to start from scratch.

My mother fled civil war in Somalia at thirteen years old. She raised four children in a country whose language she was still learning, working multiple jobs to keep us stable while I grew up learning two things simultaneously: the language of the country we lived in, and the language of survival. Being the child of an immigrant means you become fluent in systems before you are old enough to understand them. At nine years old I was translating medical terminology in clinic exam rooms. At fourteen I was on the phone with hospitals and state offices after a pneumonia hospitalization generated a bill that exceeded twenty thousand dollars, a number larger than our annual income. I navigated Medicaid paperwork as a child because there was no one else who could. When the approval letter finally came, my mother and I cried together at the kitchen table where I had once translated for her. That was the day I understood that access to education, like access to healthcare, is never equally distributed. Some people have to fight for it in ways others never see. The immigrant experience did not make my educational path harder in one clean, describable way. It made it harder in a hundred quiet ways that accumulated over years. It meant contributing to household expenses while studying. It meant pausing my education when I lost my cousin and became the legal immigration sponsor for my family, because the eldest daughter carries what needs to be carried. It meant navigating financial aid systems without a parent who had done it before, researching scholarships independently because no one in my family knew they existed, and building the infrastructure of my own academic life from scratch while also helping build my family’s. It also gave me things that cannot be taught in a classroom. A clear understanding of why I am pursuing medicine. A specific community I am returning to. A firsthand knowledge of what it costs a family when systems fail them, and what it means when someone finally shows up who understands. I graduated summa cum laude in Biology from Augsburg University with a 3.95 GPA. I conducted research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic. I am now pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University. I have won over $40,000 in scholarships by telling the truth about where I come from and what I am building toward. The immigrant experience did not limit my ability to attain my educational goals. It clarified them. Every barrier I navigated became evidence of what is missing for families like mine. Every door I had to push open harder than someone else becomes a door I intend to hold open. My education is not separate from the community I come from. It is the most useful thing I can bring back to it. My mother worked through exhaustion so her children could reach opportunities she never could. I intend to make sure that work was worth it.

My mother never named what she was carrying. She just kept working. Three jobs, four children, a country whose language she was still learning. For years I watched her push through pain she did not have the time or language or access to explain to a doctor. It was only later, after I had started studying medicine in earnest, that I began to understand what had been happening in her body. Uterine fibroids affect Black women at two to three times the rate of white women, cause more severe symptoms, and are diagnosed later, often because their pain is not taken seriously by the systems meant to help them. When I learned that, I thought of my mother. I thought of how much she had normalized suffering because the alternative, navigating a healthcare system that had never been designed with her in mind, felt impossible. That is why I am passionate about uterine fibroid research. Not as an abstraction. As something I have watched shape a real person’s life. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, with the goal of becoming a physician focused on surgical oncology and women’s health equity. My research background has given me the tools to understand how structural inequity operates at every level of medicine, from who gets diagnosed to who gets treated to who benefits from innovation. At the Mayo Clinic Innovation Scholars Program, I restructured the commercialization strategy for a pancreatic cancer device after discovering that Black patients, the highest-risk group, would have been excluded under the original plan. The same pattern appears in fibroid care. Black women wait longer for diagnosis, are less likely to receive minimally invasive treatment options, and are more likely to undergo hysterectomy when less invasive alternatives exist. The disparity is not biological. It is systemic. I plan to contribute to this field in several ways. As a physician, I intend to practice in communities where fibroid burden is highest and access to specialized care is lowest. As a researcher, I want to study how structural factors, including insurance type, provider bias, geographic access, and patient-provider communication, shape fibroid treatment pathways for Black and immigrant women. And as someone committed to community storytelling, I want to help close the awareness gap that causes so many women to normalize symptoms that are neither inevitable nor untreatable. My mother did not have someone to tell her that what she was experiencing had a name, a cause, and a treatment. She did not have a physician who looked like her or understood her history or took her pain seriously enough to investigate it fully. I am becoming that physician for the next woman who walks through the door carrying what my mother carried, pain she has learned to survive instead of treat. Uterine fibroid research is not separate from the work I have always been doing. It is one more place where equity and medicine meet, and where the distance between them costs women their health.

I grew up as the person my family called when something needed to be figured out. Medical bills. Insurance forms. Clinic appointments in a language my mother was still learning. I did not have a framework for this at nine years old. I just knew that when I translated for my mother in a clinic exam room, fear left her face the moment she understood what the doctor was saying. That moment taught me that being heard is its own form of care, and that the gap between a system and the people it is supposed to serve is often the most important place to stand. That gap is where I have built my life’s work. I am a first-generation Somali-American student pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, with the goal of becoming a physician focused on immigrant and underserved community health. I graduated summa cum laude in Biology from Augsburg University with a 3.95 GPA, conducted independent research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and led an equity analysis at the Mayo Clinic where I restructured a cancer device commercialization strategy after discovering that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would have been excluded under the original plan. I have worked in street medicine in Los Angeles, supporting unhoused patients in accessing prenatal and addiction care. I have served as a Designated Coordinator with the State of Minnesota, advocating for adults with intellectual disabilities who were avoiding medical appointments out of fear shaped by immigration enforcement rhetoric, even when their legal status was never in question. The positive impact I plan to make is specific. I want to practice medicine in communities that have historically avoided or been failed by healthcare systems. I want to conduct research on the structural factors that determine who receives care and who does not. And I want to build an immigrant health equity institute that integrates clinical care, community storytelling, and policy advocacy into a single institution rooted in the communities it serves. I am also making an impact now through my capstone project at Harvard, a documentary film called Guri, which means home in Somali. The film centers Somali Minnesotans reflecting on what it means to belong somewhere and to have that belonging constantly questioned. I argue that narrative instability is a public health issue, that when communities are repeatedly framed as fraudulent or threatening, people stop accessing care and health outcomes shift in ways that data alone cannot fully capture. The film is an intervention. So is every choice I make to stay in rooms that were not originally built for people like me. I carry the legacy of my mother, who worked through exhaustion so her children could reach opportunities she never could. I carry the patients I have sat beside, the students I have mentored, and the community members who taught me what it means to need someone who already understands. I am going back to those communities. I am just going back with more to offer.

I did not grow up thinking about the nonprofit sector. I grew up thinking about my community, and eventually I realized that what I was already doing had a name. At sixteen I served on the Eden Prairie Human Rights and Diversity Commission, sitting beside Somali families at public hearings and translating so their voices could reach the people with the power to act. At nineteen I founded the Student Health Equity Initiative at Occidental College because underrepresented pre-med students needed more than academic support. They needed to see that medicine was possible for people who looked like them. I mentored first-generation students through TRIO at Augsburg University, guiding them through the practical landscape of higher education that is often invisible to students whose families have not been through it. When a young man in my community was bullied so severely he stopped going to school, I said yes when others said they were too busy. I sat with him until something shifted. None of this felt like sector work. It felt like responsibility. The nonprofit world gave structure to what I had already been doing since I was old enough to understand that some people need someone in their corner who has walked the same road. I want to pursue work in the nonprofit sector because the communities I care about, low-income, immigrant, Somali-American, first-generation, are communities that institutional systems have consistently underserved, and the organizations closest to those communities are nonprofits. They are the ones doing street medicine in Los Angeles, running youth leadership academies in Minneapolis, translating at hospital bedsides, and building the infrastructure of belonging that government programs often cannot reach. My long-term vision is to build an immigrant health equity institute that operates at the intersection of clinical care, community research, and storytelling. The institute would train culturally competent providers, fund community health workers from within the communities they serve, support documentary and media projects that put underrepresented people in control of their own narratives, and conduct research on the structural factors that shape health access for immigrant populations. It would be nonprofit because its measure of success would be community outcomes, not revenue. I have already begun building toward this. My capstone project at Harvard is a documentary film called Guri, which means home in Somali. It centers Somali Minnesotans reflecting on belonging, fear, and what it costs a community’s health when its members do not feel safe accessing care. I have seen in my own family and in my clinical work how narrative shapes behavior, how people avoid appointments, delay care, and disconnect from systems out of fear. The film is an intervention. So is the institute I intend to build. I want to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector because I believe the most important work happens in the spaces that exist not to generate profit but to close the distance between people and what they need. I have been doing that work my whole life. I am just getting better at it.

I did not choose medicine. Medicine chose me before I had any say in it. I was nine years old the first time I stood in a clinic exam room and translated for my mother. She had fled war in Somalia, raised four children, worked every shift available to her, and I had never seen her look afraid. That day I did. The doctor spoke and she did not understand, and her fear filled the room. I asked her in Somali where it hurt. When she answered, the fear left her face. Not when the doctor spoke. When she finally understood. That moment installed something in me that has never left. I saw that the distance between a patient and their care is not always clinical. Sometimes it is linguistic. Sometimes it is structural. Sometimes it is a system that was built without your community in mind, and the only way to cross the distance is to find someone willing to stand in the middle and translate, in every sense of that word. I chose medicine because I want to be that person with a degree, a license, and the clinical authority to do more than translate. I want to diagnose, treat, follow patients over time, and practice in communities that interact with healthcare the least, not because they do not need it, but because they have learned not to trust it. The specific field I am pursuing is medicine with a focus on surgical oncology and chronic disease equity. My interest sharpened at the Mayo Clinic, where I evaluated a pancreatic cancer device and discovered that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would have been largely excluded from accessing it under the original commercialization plan. I restructured the strategy to prioritize Medicaid reimbursement and safety-net hospital adoption. That experience taught me that a medical innovation that does not reach the people who need it most is an unfinished one. I intend to spend my career making sure that gap gets smaller. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, where I am developing a documentary film about how harmful public narratives affect the health-seeking behavior of Somali-American communities. I have seen in my own work and in my own family how fear shaped by rhetoric causes people to delay care, avoid appointments, and disconnect from systems that could help them. Narrative is a clinical variable. My degree is teaching me to treat it like one. In the future I want to practice medicine, conduct research on structural health disparities, and build an immigrant health equity institute that combines clinical care, community storytelling, and policy advocacy. I want to create the kind of institution I would have wanted my mother to walk into at nine years old, one where safety does not have to be negotiated and care does not require translation. That is why I chose this field. And it is why I will not leave it.

I want to be a physician because of a silence I heard when I was fourteen years old. I was lying in a hospital bed in St. Paul with pneumonia, listening to relatives in the hallway whisper about a bill that exceeded twenty thousand dollars. My mother called between shifts from Canada. When I told her the number, she went quiet. That silence scared me more than the diagnosis. After I was discharged, I spent weeks on the phone with hospitals and state offices, a child trying to navigate a system that had not been designed with my family in mind. When the Medicaid approval letter finally arrived, my mother and I read it together and cried. That was the day I understood that health is not only biology. It is access, stability, and the chance to heal without drowning in fear. That experience is why I am pursuing medicine, and it shapes the specific kind of physician I want to become. I am drawn to surgical oncology and chronic disease medicine, particularly in the context of immigrant and underserved communities. My interest in oncology deepened during my time at the Mayo Clinic Innovation Scholars Program, where I evaluated a patented pancreatic cancer device. When I pulled the NIH data, I found that Black patients carry the highest burden of pancreatic cancer in the country, yet the device’s original commercialization strategy would have made them among the least likely to benefit. I restructured the strategy around Medicaid reimbursement and safety-net hospital adoption. That experience taught me that the distance between a medical innovation and the patient who needs it most is often not scientific. It is structural. I want to be the kind of physician who understands that distance and works to close it from inside the exam room and outside it. My clinical training has reinforced this direction. At Children’s Dental Services, I translated for a Somali mother whose toddler needed emergency surgery. Her hands were shaking as she held the treatment plan. The moment she realized someone on the team understood her, something shifted in her face. I recognized her fear because I had watched my own mother carry it. At a street medicine nonprofit in Los Angeles, I sat beside an unhoused pregnant woman and helped her build a list of prenatal resources she could actually access. These moments did not feel separate from medicine. They felt like the foundation of it. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, where I am also developing a documentary film about the health consequences of narrative instability in Somali-American communities. My long-term goal is to practice medicine in the communities I come from and eventually build an immigrant health equity institute that integrates clinical care, community research, and storytelling. The field I am entering is demanding and humbling. I am ready for that. I have been preparing for it since I was nine years old, asking my mother in Somali where it hurt, and learning that the answer to that question is the beginning of everything.

I went into the Mayo Clinic Innovation Scholars Program believing that good science was enough. If the research was rigorous, if the data was sound, if the protocols were followed correctly, then the work was done. That assumption did not survive contact with reality. I had taken over the biological evaluation of a patented pancreatic cancer device after my research partner withdrew mid-project. I was running experiments alone, designing protocols, assessing cancer cell viability and biomarker responses. The science was demanding but manageable. What stopped me was a different kind of data entirely. When I pulled the NIH prevalence numbers for pancreatic cancer, I found that Black patients carry the highest disease burden of any group. Then I looked at the commercialization strategy for the device I was helping to evaluate. It assumed private insurance reimbursement and adoption by large academic medical centers. I ran the overlap in my head and felt something shift. The patients who needed this device most would be among the last to access it. Not because of anything wrong with the science. Because of decisions being made in a spreadsheet about who counts as a viable market. My team encouraged me to drop the equity analysis to lighten my load. I understood the logic. I was already stretched. But I kept thinking about what it means to complete a project and call it finished when the people who need the outcome most have already been designed out of it. That did not feel like science. It felt like a choice being dressed up as a neutral process. I restructured the commercialization strategy around Medicaid reimbursement pathways and safety-net hospital adoption. I presented both the biological findings and the equity framework to Mayo Clinic faculty. Some people in that room had not thought about commercialization through that lens before. I had not expected to be the one introducing it. That experience challenged something I had not realized I assumed: that the gap between discovery and access was someone else’s problem. A researcher’s job, I thought, was to generate good data. What happens after is policy, economics, administration. But I watched a technically sound innovation head toward deployment in a way that would have deepened existing disparities, and I understood that staying in my lane would have made me complicit. The kind of medical professional I am becoming does not separate the science from the question of who it reaches. Every clinical decision, every research design, every treatment protocol exists inside a system that distributes benefit unevenly. Pretending otherwise is not objectivity. It is a form of looking away. Medicine is humbling not just because outcomes are uncertain, but because the work forces you to confront the limits of what technical excellence alone can do. I learned that at a lab bench in Minneapolis, running experiments alone, the moment I realized that getting the science right was necessary but not sufficient. It never will be.

I became a problem solver before I had a name for it. At nine years old I sat in a clinic exam room and translated for my mother, who had fled war in Somalia and was still learning the language of the country that was supposed to be safe. I asked her in Somali where it hurt. When she answered, I watched the fear leave her face. It did not leave when the doctor spoke. It left when she finally understood what he was saying. That moment taught me something I have carried ever since: being heard is its own medicine. At fourteen I was hospitalized with pneumonia. I listened from my hospital bed as relatives whispered about a bill that exceeded twenty thousand dollars. My mother went silent on the phone when I told her. That silence scared me more than the diagnosis. After discharge, I spent weeks calling hospitals and state offices, a child trying to speak a system’s language. When the Medicaid approval letter came, my mother and I read it together and cried. That was the day I understood that health is not just biology. It is stability, access, and the chance to survive without drowning in fear. Those experiences did not just shape my values. They became my direction. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, where my capstone project is a documentary film called Guri, which means home in Somali. The film documents the health consequences of narrative instability in Somali-American communities, examining how fear shaped by public rhetoric causes people to delay care, avoid clinics, and disconnect from systems that could help them. I have seen this firsthand in my work as a Designated Coordinator with the State of Minnesota, where I supported adults with intellectual disabilities and mental health conditions who were avoiding medical appointments out of fear of immigration enforcement, even when their legal status was not in question. Narrative shapes access. I am building a career around changing both. My research background runs alongside this work. At Johns Hopkins School of Medicine I conducted independent microbiology research. At the Mayo Clinic I evaluated a pancreatic cancer device and restructured its commercialization strategy after discovering that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would have been excluded under the original plan. At a street medicine nonprofit in Los Angeles I sat beside an unhoused pregnant woman and helped her build a list of prenatal resources she could actually access. In every space, I found the same gap between what systems offer and what communities can reach. My degree is how I am learning to close it. I founded the Student Health Equity Initiative at Occidental College to create belonging for underrepresented pre-med students. I mentored first-generation students through TRIO at Augsburg University. I served on the Eden Prairie Human Rights and Diversity Commission at sixteen, organizing a citywide panel on youth gun violence with the mayor and translating for Somali families at public hearings. My program at Harvard is giving me the tools to do this work at scale. My goal is to become a physician and build an immigrant health equity institute grounded in clinical care, community research, and storytelling. I am not entering medicine to leave my community behind. I am going back with more to offer.

I did not grow up thinking of myself as a STEM person. I grew up as the person my family called when something needed to be figured out. Medical bills, insurance forms, clinic appointments in a language my mother was still learning. Science came later, but the instinct behind it, the need to understand how things work and why some people are left out of how they work, that was always there. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University. My planned field is medicine, specifically physician scientist work at the intersection of clinical care, health equity research, and community advocacy. I graduated summa cum laude in Biology with a 3.95 GPA from Augsburg University and have conducted research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic Innovation Scholars Program. My passion for STEM is rooted in a specific question that has followed me my entire life: why do some communities carry so much more disease burden, and what can science actually do about it? At Johns Hopkins, I studied bacterial cytotoxin expression during immune cell interactions, learning what rigorous independent research requires. At the Mayo Clinic, I evaluated a pancreatic cancer device and discovered that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would be excluded from accessing it under the original commercialization plan. I restructured the strategy around Medicaid reimbursement and safety-net hospital adoption so the innovation could actually reach the people who needed it most. At Augsburg, I designed a quantitative study on race, income, and diabetes prevalence in Minnesota and presented findings at regional STEM conferences. Each of these experiences deepened the same conviction: science without equity is incomplete. Data can identify a problem. Research can design a solution. But if the solution does not reach the people most affected, the work is not finished. My planned field of study is medicine, and I intend to practice in communities that interact with healthcare systems the least, not because they do not need care, but because those systems have not been built with them in mind. My long-term goal is to build an immigrant health equity institute that combines clinical care, community-based research, and storytelling to address the structural gaps that data alone cannot close. STEM gave me the language to name what I had always witnessed. Medicine is how I intend to act on it moving forward.

I grew up as the person my community called when they needed someone to translate, navigate, or advocate. At nine years old that meant sitting in a clinic exam room and asking my mother in Somali where it hurt. At fourteen it meant spending weeks on the phone with hospitals and state offices after a pneumonia hospitalization nearly bankrupted my family. At sixteen it meant sitting beside Somali families at city commission meetings so their voices could reach people with the power to act. I did not choose this role. It chose me. But somewhere along the way I stopped seeing it as a burden and started seeing it as a calling. I am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard University, and I plan to become a physician focused on immigrant and underserved community health. The degree I am building is not a credential I intend to carry out of my community. It is a tool I am bringing back into it. The communities I come from, low-income, immigrant, Somali-American, first-generation, are communities that interact with medical systems the least, not because they do not need care, but because the system has repeatedly made care feel unsafe, inaccessible, or not designed for them. I have watched relatives delay hospital visits out of fear. I have sat beside patients who avoided clinics because they did not believe anyone there would understand them. I have seen what happens when a person finally meets a provider who looks like them, speaks their language, and does not make them feel like a problem to be solved. Something shifts. Trust enters the room. That is the physician I intend to be. At the Mayo Clinic, I conducted research on a pancreatic cancer device and discovered that Black patients, who carry the highest disease burden, would be excluded under the original commercialization plan. I restructured the strategy to prioritize Medicaid reimbursement and safety-net hospital adoption. At a street medicine nonprofit in Los Angeles, I sat beside an unhoused pregnant woman and helped her build a list of prenatal resources she could actually access. In both cases, the work was the same: closing the distance between what a system offers and what a community can actually receive. My long-term goal is to build an immigrant health equity institute grounded in clinical care, community storytelling, and research. I want to create infrastructure that does not disappear when I leave the room, programs that train culturally competent providers, partnerships that bring care into communities rather than waiting for communities to find their way in, and documentary work that makes the human cost of health inequity impossible to ignore. My degree is how I earn the authority to do that work at scale. But the work itself began long before any institution recognized it, at kitchen tables, on curbs in Los Angeles, in clinic rooms where someone needed to understand what the doctor was saying. I am going back to those rooms. I am just going back with more to offer.