At a HOBY Youth Leadership Seminar at Illinois Wesleyan last summer, Lorelei Arnold heard another student mention starting a healthcare club at their school. The idea landed immediately.

"We don't have anything like that," she thought.

By the end of the summer, the Tri-Valley junior had built the framework herself — secured approval from Principal Frank Arnolts, recruited anatomy teacher Mrs. Krissy Vaux as the club's advisor, developed officer applications, set up an Instagram page, and launched recruitment. The Medical Professionals Club held its first meeting in September.

About 50 students joined.

"I was just super excited about it," Arnold said.

The membership spans the full range of healthcare interests: nursing, emergency medicine, veterinary medicine, physical therapy, dentistry, nutrition, and genetics. Guest speakers visit monthly meetings. The officer team includes two vice presidents, a communications officer, a treasurer, and a secretary. It's a real organization — first year, built from nothing.

The advice Lorelei gives younger members is simple: show up even when the topic isn't your thing.

"Even if, say, like, 'Oh, I don't want to be a dentist, so I'm not going to come because the guest speaker is a dentist' — I would encourage them to still come," she said. "I've learned a lot of different things from different careers that I had no idea about."

Lorelei's orientation toward healthcare didn't start with a career brochure. It started at home.

Her mother is a nurse who recently earned a master's in nurse leadership. Her father was a hospital chaplain early in his career, then a pastor for about ten years, then went back to school and became a physical therapy assistant. Extended family includes nurses and a midwife. At one Thanksgiving, nursing students in the family practiced starting IVs on each other around the holiday table.

"My grandma was not happy about it," Lorelei said.

But the deepest influence is her younger sister, Annabelle, who was born with a genetic disorder and a heart defect. She started out non-verbal, used a talker to communicate, and needed a walker for mobility. Physical therapists came to the house every week. The family made trips to a hospital in St. Louis. They consulted with geneticists.

"She's come a long way now," Lorelei said of Annabelle, who is a current 6th grader at Tri-Valley Middle School.

Watching that — the therapists, the specialists, the slow and extraordinary progress — shaped how Lorelei sees the profession. Healthcare wasn't an abstraction in her household. It was Tuesday.

The genetics piece in particular stuck. "I'm also a little bit interested in genetics, because of that," she said — the direct result of years spent watching her sister's condition be studied and treated.

Last summer, Lorelei attended a healthcare camp at Drake University that arrived in her inbox almost by chance. A pre-med student there told her he'd gotten his EMT license before applying to medical school, and that it helped far more than the CNA route most pre-med students take. That conversation redirected her planning. She's now pursuing EMT certification during her senior year.

She has also volunteered at Carle Hospital in Bloomington for two summers, both years in the surgery department — that's where her mother worked, so the placement was coincidental. This year, she begged the volunteer coordinator to move her.

"I finally got a chance to be placed in the ER," she said.

This summer she's also taking Health Careers and Terminology at Heartland Community College — another layer before the college applications begin in earnest.

Academically, Lorelei is in AP Pre-Calculus this year with AP Calculus, AP Chemistry, and accelerated physics planned for senior year. She's already scored in the Vanderbilt range on her first ACT attempt and retook it in June after prepping with Jason Franklin's class at Illinois Wesleyan. Her college list includes Vanderbilt and Belmont in Nashville, plus schools across the Midwest — though she's not set on staying in Illinois.

"University of Chicago is a little bit too much in Chicago for me," she said.

She hasn't always been at Tri-Valley. Lorelei transferred from Heyworth in fifth grade — the same year COVID hit. She showed up to a new school, and then everyone went home.

"It was a little bit difficult," she said.

But the community grew around her. When she describes Tri-Valley now, she reaches for a phrase that surprises people.

"It's like the most private public school that I've been to," she said. "People are just very close. There's a different kind of respect. People want to support each other. Everybody wants to see each other succeed."

When asked what she wanted to be as a little kid, she laughed.

"I wanted to be an ice cream truck worker at one point."

From ice cream trucks to emergency rooms. She's sixteen. She built a 50-member club in its first year, she's volunteering in an ER, and she's writing college essays. The sister who used a talker and a walker is doing things no one expected. And the girl who showed up to a new school the year the world shut down has turned out to be someone who builds what's missing.