My time in the Leo Club offered me a first introduction to a world of knowledge beyond the classroom, as we worked with a local clinic organizing free diabetes screenings to serve people lacking health insurance. Many of those we screened were Hispanic immigrants who spoke little English, their words strung with fear and confusion. Responding in Spanish, I found that my efforts to acknowledge their needs could make a piece of that anxiety disappear.

Rather than blindly informing others about diabetes, I took the opportunity to become more aware of the barriers that minorities face in healthcare. Educating myself on the intricacies of the medical world–impacts of patient-doctor relationships, diseases that persist disproportionately in minority groups–I worked to better understand and serve each person who entered the clinic. More than sharpening my fluency, I began to weave the lessons of language, humanity, and medicine in order to empathize with others in their vulnerable moments.

After a year of work studying campus ecosystems and informing wildlife conservation through the University of North Texas’s Department of Biological Sciences, the importance of centering STEM in a real-world context inspired me more than ever. Poring over references and condensing 3-months’ worth of camera trap images into a cohesive paper, I spent this time scaling conservation to the urban level. However, the moment I looked beyond my small pool of data and figures, I was shocked by a sea of questions that still remained unanswered. By encroaching upon untouched habitats, even with the preface of protection, what fundamental systems of life do we alter, and what are the consequences? How do we strengthen the communities that rely most on ecosystem services? What is the key to better understanding and respecting our delicate relationship with nature?

From serving uninsured individuals in North Texas with the Primary Care Clinic of Texas to collaborating with international peers to assess global health access as a World Learning student ambassador, my experiences working with diverse groups of individuals have inspired my goals for understanding and advancing equity in the health space more than the limited satisfaction of a high GPA ever could. This spring, I will join undergraduates and faculty at UT Austin to research migrant Venezuelan workers’ access to primary care in Colombia in collaboration with the President’s Award for Global Learning program. The interdisciplinary nature of our project affords me the opportunity to explore how STEM education interacts with economics and art, as we utilize videography to promote a model of coffee production that is sustainable in both profit and public well-being. I cannot wait to bring this interest in creating community-centered solutions in Colombia to communities in my local area and beyond, a feat I would not be able to accomplish without translating my learning beyond the classroom.

In realizing the infinite ways public health presents itself, I hope to discover approaches that center hope and community and challenge my current understanding of conservation and collaborative action. Through strong extracurriculars, I will continue learning from collective spaces to reframe my lens and encompass others’ experiences. Amid the excitement of reengineering current knowledge, I am as captivated by discovery as I am by the people and experiences I will encounter along the way, with conversations that will continue to collapse and reconstruct the way I approach the world.