I sat on the second floor of the Centro Médico Dominicano and reassembled, for the fifth time that morning, the plastic eye model I had used to understand the hundreds of ocular disorders introduced in my copy of The Wills Eye Manual.

After high school, I chose to join the United States Marine Corps to gain direction and improve my self-efficacy. When I first joined, one of my fears was getting vaccinated.

I envy those whose passions trace back to a perfect anecdote, because mine do not.

My macho Mexican father told me in a serious tone, “Son, you are only allowed to cry once in your life and that time is when your father dies.”

My passion for caring for others began with my mother. Growing up in a working-class family in Oklahoma, my two siblings and I took pride in caring for her.

My mother was my only parent after my father abandoned us during my childhood in rural Ghana.

A soothing warmth on my chest and a pervading smell of menthol—the memory that imposes itself on my thoughts whenever I recall the experiences that sparked my passion for medicine.

The year I turned seven, the words papeles and inmigrantes entered my vocabulary and settled on my family as a fog of dissonance between the American I was and the Americans my family members were not.

I have not always known I wanted to be a doctor, romantic though it may be to say otherwise. As a young Wyomingite boy who spent his days roaming the vast expanses of prairie that were my backyard, I wanted to be an Egyptologist who worked outdoors digging up the ancient past or a veterinarian who traveled from ranch to ranch, vaccinating cows or delivering foals.

Honey and turmeric: from a young age, my mother would blend these ingredients into a sticky yellow paste to soothe skin or calm a cough.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment I chose to be a doctor - since childhood, I’ve felt called to the medical field. It’s a part of who I am, woven into the fabric of my being. I’m named Mary, after my brave grandmother who fought cancer for nearly twenty years.

Stirred from a deep sleep by a loud knock, my bleary-eyed fourteen-year-old self fought back the covers and opened the bedroom door to find my father there, stethoscope draped around his neck.

I am a Salvadoran-Sicilian-American woman raised in San Francisco. My family is small and close knit, made up of me, my younger sister, and my mother and father.

I was raised on Catalpa and Francisco in Chicago’s Albany Park. You can find my childhood home wedged between the Korean-American Chamber of Commerce and the Telshe Yeshiva Chicago, just next to Devon Ave.’s Desi Corridor.