When Jess was in high school, her best friend’s father was diagnosed with ALS. There is no cure. The average lifespan after diagnosis is two to five years. She went to college planning to dedicate her life to researching a treatment.

She spent three years in neuroscience working on nanoparticles that could slow disease progression. She was ready to pursue a PhD when her professor told her plainly: the competition would be fierce, the debt would be crushing, and her odds weren’t good. She had no backup plan.

She graduated and took a job as a behavior interventionist working with kids on the autism spectrum. It wasn’t the path she’d imagined, but she showed up and she learned.

Then in 2016, her father had a stroke. He lost his speech. The person she admired most couldn’t tell her what day it was or that he loved her.

During his hospital stay, a speech-language pathologist helped him get it all back. To someone who didn’t know what had happened, you would never guess he’d had a stroke. His recovery was remarkable enough that the hospital asked him to be a spokesperson for their stroke unit.

Jess knew exactly what she wanted to do next.

She went back to school, built her prerequisites, and applied to NYU’s graduate program in Speech-Language Pathology, one of the top ten programs in the country. She got a letter saying she was in. She called her dad. She told everyone.

Three days later, NYU called back. They’d made a mistake. She wasn’t admitted.

She had to call her dad again. She had to tell everyone she’d told.

She didn’t quit. She shadowed SLPs, built her experience, reapplied the following year, and got another call from admissions. This time she asked them to confirm it twice before she believed it. She started at NYU in January 2020.