Valentina Pérez-Araya had been planning to study civil engineering. She'd thought it through, knew the track, had a direction. Then she changed her mind. "I think I like medicine a lot more," she said. "Ever since I was little, I wanted to be a doctor."

The reason for that reaches back to when she was eight or nine years old. Her family had just moved from Costa Rica — five of them, no family in the US, no help, no English, just the opportunity her father had been offered and pursued for three years through visa processes and paperwork before it actually happened. The plan was temporary: come to the US, let the kids learn English, then take those opportunities back home. But first, her father was diagnosed with leukemia.

They had just moved to North Carolina when it happened. Nobody in the family spoke English fluently yet. In the middle of a new country, a new language, a new everything, Valentina watched the doctors and nurses care for her father — the science and the compassion together. "They would bring me gifts," she said, "and they would just help our family out." That stayed with her.

She's going to the University of Illinois this fall to study neuroscience on the pre-med track. She chose neuroscience deliberately — most pre-med students take biology to protect their GPA, she explained, but she's genuinely interested in the brain. Neuroscience gets her the medical school prerequisites while letting her study something she actually loves. And if she ends up on a research path instead — a master's, a doctorate — the foundation holds. "The brain is such a complex thing," she said. "There's so much more to learn about it." Her specialty of choice, if she gets there, is oncology. Her father's field.

The road from that first day in North Carolina to the University of Illinois was not smooth. She came home from her first day of school and ran to her mother, crying. "I was bawling my eyes out. I can't be here. I just can't do it." Her mother and father told her she was strong, told her to think about the opportunities this would open. Kids at school — and sometimes adults — would mock her accent, or speak English deliberately to exclude her. She could tell even when she didn't understand the words. "You can tell because they're looking straight at you and they're laughing and pointing. Really obvious." She said it taught her to read body language well.

She learned the basics of English in about a month through ESL instruction. Within a few years, she was fluent. Spanish she kept — it's spoken at home, always has been. "I decided to turn all of that into motivation," she said. Now she tutors ESL students, and when she sits with them, she tells them where she started. "I started here. Look how far I've come. Look at everything I've accomplished. I've done so many things that a lot of people whose English was their first language might not be able to accomplish." The Macomb ESL program, she mentioned, serves students who speak 14 different languages.

The family's citizenship came through after a ten-year process. "A long process," Valentina said simply. "Ten years. But got it done." Getting it felt like a release. Before, she had watched what she said publicly, even on social media — worried that advocacy might somehow complicate the application. After: "so liberating." She knows some of the ESL students she tutors are living in the current immigration climate without that protection. "These are children," she said. "For them to have to worry about that — I feel like that is horrific." She tells them: you'll be okay, take a deep breath, it's okay.

She's been working all year with Señora Hamer, the district's EL director, on a proposal to better connect ESL families to the Macomb community — starting with something simple: translating the emails the school sends out into families' native languages. She told Señora Hamer she'd FaceTime from Urbana if the proposal needs her after she leaves. She means it.

During Hispanic Heritage Month, she reads cultural facts over the school intercom. "Even if people aren't listening," she said, "I know there's somebody out there who this is gonna affect."

Her younger brother is at Edison now. Her older brother didn't go through school here. She's an Illinois State Scholar. She got into U of I.

She said she wants to be in the medical field, what those North Carolina doctors were for her family — a safety net for immigrant families navigating the hardest moments of their lives without a language to lean on. She said something else too, about what makes the work worth doing, and attributed it to Bad Bunny: "Love is so much better than hate." Yes, she said. That.