Every day, I try to see through the patient lens, and I ask: what can we do to change this broken system?

“It’s hard to see others struggle,” she said. “How can I help with their struggle without struggling myself?”

"I'd tell her it's OK to be loud...it's OK to challenge and to bring all of you into these spaces where no one looks like you..."

“When everything else stops, we keep going,” she began. This woman had always wanted to be a physician, and as a medical school student, was about to become the seventh generation of physicians on her mother’s side of the family.

She was tired after working twelve straight days on her current rotation. It was her third year of medical school, and she was already feeling burnt out. “I have five more years like this,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘Keep pushing, you can get through it,’ but I don’t know if I can.”

"I struggled to make friends until my junior year of high school," she said. "Then I finally opened up and became friends with so many people." She was now a freshman at Georgetown University and was learning how to bond with her new peers.

“I miss my four cats back home,” she said. “Want to see pictures of them?!” She was a graduate student in biotechnology. She explained that the program consumed her life. She saw other students studying abroad, posting pictures of travel and fun, but there was no room for that in her life.