Aarin Dave

In Valdosta, the nearest specialist sits more than an hour away. Growing up, I watched distance and cost quietly determine who received care and who did not. My grandmother could not visit family because the regional infrastructure could not support her dialysis needs. Neighbors drove forty miles for routine appointments. What I absorbed from that place was not a lesson but an instinct: the gap between what people need and what they receive is never inevitable, and someone always closes it.

The crystallizing moment came from a man named Freddie Taylor, my computer science teacher's father-in-law, who had just undergone open-heart surgery and could no longer speak. He gestured toward a clock, raised two fingers, and pointed at the floor. Nobody understood. The room's silence amplified his frustration, and a cardiologist, watching, remarked: "If only there were an app for these patients." A patient who cannot communicate, a grandmother who cannot travel for dialysis, a neighbor who cannot reach a specialist — these are not separate problems. They are the same problem at different scales, and the question I carry into Harvard is whether technology can finally close the distance.