It started during COVID as a Discord server, because my high school was small and almost nobody there was interested in medicine. Within weeks hundreds of strangers across several continents had joined, all asking the same question: how do you actually get into healthcare? The information exists, but it moves through people. If you know a doctor, you know what a competitive application looks like and how to ask for a shadowing placement. If you don't, you are guessing.

So I built what I had needed. I ran the calendar, asked students what they were stuck on, and turned the answers into workshops on the unglamorous mechanics: how to email a doctor asking to shadow, how to fit a hospital volunteer CV on one page, how to read a lab report. One of our first mock interview sessions ran out of my bedroom at midnight while I was still sending reminders and finishing slides.

It grew into eight student-run departments: Research, Content, Podcast, Blogging, Project Management, Resource Creation, Engagement, and HR. The students running them decided what Passion4Med became. The Research team published papers bimonthly. Engagement ran virtual shadowing sessions. We built 300+ resources spanning medical school, nursing, biotech, and biomedical engineering, partnered with 15+ healthcare organizations, and paired students one-on-one with professionals by shared interest.

Running it turned out to be the actual job. At its peak I was managing 85+ interns and volunteers across time zones, which meant writing role descriptions, building onboarding, and learning that a volunteer team falls apart quietly when nobody feels ownership of anything.

A student in rural Montana had nearly given up on healthcare because the only path she knew about was becoming a doctor. Through mentorship she ended up connected to a biomedical engineer working on prosthetics. A first-generation student learned her background wasn't a liability but a perspective the field was short on. The message I keep coming back to was from a high schooler who said a template we shared was what finally made her confident enough to email a doctor.

“Did you see how lean her muscles are?” a teammate whispered once, watching another girl on our tennis team stretch before a match. Underneath the trophies, I had been noticing for a while how constant self-comparison was wearing down people I cared about. One of my closest teammates was dealing with anorexia and I didn't know how to help beyond being there.

Around the same time I joined Harvard's STRIPED Initiative, working with researchers, lawyers, and activists studying how diet pills and supplements get marketed to teenagers. Seeing how directly that marketing connects to eating disorders and body image, while watching my teammate live it, is what pushed me to start MetaHealth.

I built it around workshops that had nothing to do with restriction: balanced eating, cooking, and the psychology behind body image. 60+ people came through the program across 20+ sessions, and the group was more varied than I expected: aspiring chefs, psychology students, and people who mostly wanted somewhere to talk. A debate about how much seasoning is too much turned into an hour on culture and family food traditions, and that kept happening. Food was the entry point. The conversation underneath it was the real work.

I wound MetaHealth down in 2024.