Dear Vivian, You’re not real—I know that. Just a character in Wit. And yet, here I am, writing to you like you could read this, like you’d nod at the parts I get wrong. Maybe that’s silly. Still, I can’t shake you. I thought the film would drag, honestly. A “serious” movie, the kind teachers like to assign. But then I watched you get stripped down—by cancer, yes, but more by the way people treated you. The doctors with their clipped words, their Latin, their charts. Brilliant, sure, but so cold. You weren’t even Vivian to them, just “the patient.” I remember actually pausing the movie once, just sitting there thinking, Is this what medicine looks like? It made me uneasy in a way I couldn’t laugh off. And then there was you, still clinging to language, poetry, wit (the title fits too well). I don’t know why, but I can still see that one scene—just you in the hospital bed, machines humming, no one around. Nothing happened, but it made my chest tight. Silence can hurt more than pain sometimes. Here’s the part I didn’t expect: you made me see medicine differently. I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, oncology pulling me hardest. Before, I thought of it as science—cells, research, solutions. But watching you reminded me: what’s the point if the person disappears under all of that? Since then, you’ve followed me around. Into the community garden, when I showed a man how not to crush a seedling between his fingers. Into the kitchen, baking bread for a woman on chemo—her whisper that it was the only food she could keep down still rings in my ears. Even into a conference room, my hands sweating as I presented cancer research to doctors. I could almost feel you there, reminding me: don’t lose the human part. Sometimes I think about the poetry you loved—John Donne, his lines about death not being proud. I remember reading those words after the movie, mouthing them quietly, trying to feel what you felt. They didn’t give me answers, but they did something else: they made the silence less sharp. Maybe that’s what poetry is, what medicine should be too—not fixing everything, but softening the edges so people don’t feel alone inside them. And the ending—God. The doctors couldn’t give you peace. It was the nurse who did. She read you a children’s book, held your hand, sat with you in the silence. That hit harder than any textbook could. It was like medicine boiled down to its essence: being there. I don’t want to forget that. If I ever stand in that white coat, I don’t just want to treat tumors. I want to hold the people who carry them. To see the families, the silences, the fear. To remember that sometimes presence is the treatment. You’ll never know I wrote this, but maybe that’s fine. You left me with something to carry. That’s enough. Yours, Tori

Beats, Burdens, and Brain Push-Ups: A Math Mixtape Track 1: “First Crush” (AP Calc AB) AP Calc AB was my first real math crush. I’d done equations before, sure, but derivatives and limits? That felt different. Like math wasn’t just solving for x—it was showing me how the world actually moves. Suddenly I could explain speed, growth, change… things I thought were just “there” had an engine underneath, and math was the flashlight. Track 2: “Detective Theme” (AP Statistics) Stats is basically Sherlock Holmes with a calculator. You sift through a pile of numbers that look random, but somewhere in there is a clue—patterns, probability, the “aha” moment where you realize what matters and what’s just noise. And sometimes you chase the wrong lead (false positives are the villains here). But that’s part of the fun. Track 3: “SimCity, but Real” (AP Macro) Macro is wild. It feels like playing a city-building game, except instead of “add two roads, gain 50 coins,” it’s “adjust interest rates, change lives.” It taught me that math doesn’t just live in a textbook—it literally shapes policy and economies. Also: no cheat codes. Track 4: “Glow Stick Anthem” (Biotech) Biotech made me fall even harder for math. Imagine staring at glowing proteins under a microscope. Cool, right? But here’s the kicker—the glow means nothing without the math. Growth rates, enzyme kinetics, probability models, data analysis. Math is what turns “oooh pretty lights” into actual proof. Without the numbers, it’s just a science rave. With them, it’s discovery. Track 5: “Eraser Crumbs Everywhere” (AP Calc BC) BC integrals are the boss level. They hurt. A lot. But there’s this ridiculous satisfaction in staring down something that looks impossible, covering a page in mistakes, and then finally landing the answer. Brain sore, desk messy, calculator judging you. Worth it. Every time. Encore: “Why I Keep Listening” So yeah, math hurts—but it’s the good kind. The kind that leaves you stronger. For me, it’s the playlist on repeat, the soundtrack that ties curiosity to discovery—whether I’m solving for x, digging into data, or just trying to make sense of the chaos. Math is the mixtape I’ll never turn off.

Dear Future Me, By the time you read this, I hope you’re the kind of doctor you always wanted to be—the one who shows up. You’ll remember where this started. A town where a tarp on the roof wasn’t unusual, and where the nearest hospital was “just thirty minutes away” but might as well have been across the country. You watched neighbors weigh their options: drive a car that barely ran, spend money they didn’t have, or stay home and hope the pain went away. You saw how “minor” things grew into emergencies. That’s the memory that planted medicine in you, long before biology textbooks and research conferences. Don’t forget how you learned that healing begins with listening. Think back to Family Tree Care where you shadowed Dr. Mahon. The woman who came in mid-episode, stumbling, shielding her eyes. Everyone else had written her off. But you watched Dr. Mahon dim the lights, ask careful questions, explain step by step. You saw her shoulders drop, the way trust filled the room before the prescription ever did. You promised yourself then: I’ll carry that same presence. Also—don’t forget Bearslice. It may seem silly to tie sourdough bread to oncology, but you know it isn’t. Bread taught you compassion with your hands. For the diabetic neighbor, you double-proofed loaves. For the woman in chemotherapy, you invented a lemon blueberry recipe gentle enough for her to stomach. Each loaf was a prescription: listen, adjust, try again. Bread was your first practice as a doctor, long before you had the title. And yes, remember the hunger that drove you deeper. The late nights with coffee cooling beside you, ink smeared across your palm as you chased down CRISPR articles. The time you stood at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine with your research on cancer care disparities—nervous at first, heart racing when the questions started. But you caught your breath, leaned on what you knew, and kept going. Walking out with the Outstanding Researcher Award wasn’t the real win. The real win was realizing you could stay steady when it mattered most. Now—about being a woman in medicine. You know it hasn’t always been easy to speak up. You’ve felt your questions brushed aside, your ideas doubted. You’ve watched women patients told “it’s nothing” when they knew it wasn’t. That’s why your presence matters. You aren’t here just to treat people—you’re here to listen when others don’t. To believe someone the first time. And maybe, if a younger girl watches you in a white coat and thinks, “If she can, I can too,” then you’ll have already changed the story. Don’t lose sight of hope either. You’ve seen it before—in a SNAP recipient holding their first tomato, in a chemo patient smiling because she could finally eat bread again, in a teacher who answered your extra question when the bell had long since rung. Hope grows quietly, like cancer does, but hope spreads faster when someone tends to it. That’s your job now. To tend. To keep people believing that healing is possible. So Future Me—when you’re tired, when the hours are long, when the stories get heavy—remember why you began. Remember the tarps, the thirty minutes, the neighbors who had no choices. And then remember this: you promised to show up anyway. With hope, Me

The hum of voices, the slap of cards, a burst of laughter that rattles the walls—Friday game nights at the community center always feel alive. You can smell the faint mix of popcorn from the lobby and marker ink from the whiteboards no one’s erased in weeks. One night, a 10-year-old I’ll call J. leaned over his frayed stack of Uno cards and, without looking at me, said someone on Xbox Live told him to “go die.” Just like that—flat, like it wasn’t worth emotion. We stopped playing. Talked about blocking, reporting, stepping away before the words could keep echoing in his head. He listened quietly, fingers still worrying the edge of a card. Then, when we started again, he won—slamming his last card onto the table with such exaggerated flair that the whole room laughed. I laughed, too, but kept thinking about how easily that sentence could have gone unsaid. Keeping kids safe isn’t some cinematic rescue scene. It’s a mosaic of small acts—pulling up a chair at an empty table, steering a group chat away from cruelty before it takes root, showing someone the “privacy settings” screen like you’re handing them a set of keys. It’s making kindness ordinary. I learned to notice the small things early. Middle school, a boy in my grade wore knockoff Jordans. One hallway joke turned into an anonymous Instagram account by day’s end—blurry photos, captions so lazy they weren’t even clever. By the next week, he’d stopped eating lunch with us. There was this shift in the way he moved, like he was folding in on himself. By high school, I’d joined the peer mentoring program. That’s how I met Lily—hoodie strings pulled so tight they framed her face like parentheses. One afternoon in the library, she told me she’d been getting creepy messages on Snapchat. I slid my Chromebook across the table, showed her how to block and report. The chair she sat in squeaked every time she shifted. She didn’t say much, but when she clicked the last “block,” she exhaled—a quiet, almost invisible relief. Sometimes the work isn’t in the advice. It’s in staying there long enough for someone to feel the air get lighter. Now, college is on the horizon. I’m ready for the change; I’m less ready for the tuition, housing, books—it all stacks higher than what my family can reach. We’ve always stretched what we have, but there’s no savings waiting to catch me. I’ll be piecing it together—working part-time, chasing scholarships like this one. Without help, the path narrows fast. But wherever I end up, this work comes with me. I’ll find the campus spaces where people still care about mental health, about digital safety, about making sure no one’s worst day happens in silence. You can’t erase every cruel message, rumor, or shove in the hallway. But you can be the person who stays. Sometimes that means pointing out the “block” button. Sometimes it’s losing an Uno game and pretending it was intentional (even when it wasn’t). Sometimes it’s just saying, “That’s not okay,” loud enough for someone else to take courage from it. That’s who I’ve been here—sitting in squeaky library chairs, laughing in noisy rec rooms, catching the moments before they slip by. And that’s who I’ll keep being, wherever I go next.

Hope STEMs from Gold Dr. Tori Baer on building the team and technology behind a cancer breakthrough When AURORA first entered clinical trials in 2046, critics called it “ambitious” and “wishful”. Now, it has saved thousands of lives in the past year alone. The groundbreaking cancer drug—Adaptive Ultranano Response-Oriented RNA Agent—is nothing like your average chemotherapy. At its core, gold nanoparticles deliver treatment directly to the target, engineered to recognize and attach precisely to cancer cells. Once connected, they deploy a combination of siRNA and cytotoxic agents to destroy gastrointestinal tumors. And behind it all? Dr. Tori Baer and her team wove existing technologies into a novel solution. Over tall glasses of matcha, surrounded by books, art, and a questionable number of houseplants, we sat down to discuss the road to AURORA, the team behind it, and where the passion all began. Q: How old were you when you first fell in love with science? A: It was a combination of things. I placed in the Science Olympiad in elementary school, and it felt like winning the world. I was also obsessed with my microscope and would smear everything on those slides. And my dad and I would peer through a telescope on late weeknights, hoping to catch a glimpse of Saturn’s rings. Q: Did you always think you would go into oncology? A: No. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer…until I met physics. That was a short-lived dream. (Laughs.) Q: What changed? A: An ecology class. On the first day, we investigated a cholera outbreak by tracing cases to water pumps, like we were the Sherlock Holmes of public health. Q: Was that your first contact with medicine? A: Pretty much. That year was full of dissections. I missed the sheep eye dissection and chose to make it up. I ended up at a table with some popular guys who were squealing the whole time, but I just grabbed the scalpel and got to work. There is something deeply satisfying about dissections—how can you understand how something works if you don’t know all its moving parts? That’s what medicine is. Q: What cemented medicine for you, then? A: Shadowing my primary physician. He explained kidney filtration to me and how some diabetic drugs manipulate it. My parents heard a lot about kidneys later. Q: You researched cancer pretty early, right? A: I did a bibliometric analysis on nano-oncology, and later studied how digestive cancer care varies by residential location, because rural medicine is personal to me. Those projects laid the foundation for AURORA. Q: What made AURORA possible? A: Honestly? The people. From molecular biologists to medical engineers, my team was some of the most intelligent minds I’ve ever met. They were always willing to pitch creative ideas and were unafraid to challenge me, which is exactly what I wanted. It forced me to lead, listen, and trust the process. Q: What are the criteria to be on your team? Do you think I could be on it? A: (Laughs.) Depends on whether you are willing to entertain the absurd and can thrive around scientists who challenge everything. With a passion for STEM and making a difference, you might fit in. Q: If you could say one thing to your younger self, what would it be? A: Cancer will never care whether you are from a small, rural town or if you don’t have a lab or connections. And that never stopped me either. That girl? She did it. She built the team. She built the cure. I am her.