When I began the summer, I set three clear goals for myself:
Service Goal: To ensure that more children with asthma had access to rescue inhalers at school. This was the most urgent need voiced by school nurses and directors, and I wanted to dedicate my time to helping make it a reality. I also wanted to help around the school clinic as much as possible. Helping with rosters, Epic data of kids with known sicknesses, and even giving stickers to kids at the clinic!
Personal Goal: Not to overstep. I knew coming in I had goals as a summer project, but as the youngest person in many rooms, I knew I would need to contribute my ideas while also respecting the deep experience of nurses, physicians, and staff who had been serving these communities for decades.
Professional Goal: As an aspiring physician-policymaker, I wanted to explore how medicine and public policy could meet in real-world service. I came back to Cincinnati hoping to see how systems change. Through conversations with nurses, pharmacy partnerships, or school-based care. I wanted to be on the dance floor of what could directly shape children’s health outcomes.
Looking back, I can see growth in all three areas. I helped design a system to track and deliver inhalers to schools. I kept up my track record of educated locals but instead of oncology resources to basic information about the school health center and asthma. I learned to present my ideas with clarity in rooms full of experts, while also listening closely to staff whose insights were grounded in lived experience. And I left Cincinnati with a sharper sense of how my academic path at Duke (Chemistry, policy, and Cultural Anthropology) can one day translate into a career serving children’s health through both medicine and system reform.
