Please edit this text as it won't be a self plagiarism.  I was born into a middle-class family in Iran. I grew up immersed in Iranian traditions and culture. I come from Shiraz, the historical and smell of blossoms city.  The values instilled in me by my loved ones before starting school were to be independent and pursue my dreams. 
However, when I began attending school, I was confronted with the phrase “You are a girl!” and encountered a curriculum that emphasized strict interpretations of Islam. I was taught not to trust boys or form friendships with them. 
Throughout my educational journey, I also learned to disregard and overlook classmates who didn’t perform as well as I did. I was accepted into special schools for high-achievers and found myself competing against my closest friends. Consequently, our friendships transformed into rivalries. These experiences left me without a best friend for many years, isolated from forming relationships with males, obsessively adhering to the hijab, and ignoring friends who couldn’t attend highly ranked universities or pursue top majors.
However, certain events shifted my perspective. I began working in a company, attended a summer school in a different city, and participated in an event as an executive member. Through these experiences, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with people from various backgrounds, with different academic goals and career paths. Listening to their stories, dreams, and aspirations, made me value each person as a unique individual.
I participated in many workshops, seminars, and summer schools during my dentistry course due to curiosity. One was IPHS (Iran Public Health Summer School). That was when I got familiar with this field. I learned about essential public health principles and core values, like health justice and equity.
After my graduation from dentistry, I started working in a semi-deprived city. I have never imagined myself as a dentist only working in my private office. I wanted to do something with significant impact on the community. After two years of clinical work and gaining first-hand experience of health disparities in my community, I thaught I could extend my knowledge of public health would enable me to serve people in a better way. This would help me work in an interdisciplinary environment with different professionals to improve the living standards of the people that I serve on a larger scale. Working with different groups of people was the exciting part for me as I faced it in the past.
Shortly after graduation, I signed up for a research assistant position and joined a research group with different committees working on using "Artificial Intelligence" in dentistry. After a while, I founded the Endodontics group and served as its leader and central coordinator. We have been collaborating with faculty members at different universities. This gave me a great opportunity to work on my communication and leadership skills. This included arranging meetings, ensuring progress was on track, and overseeing the quality and timeliness of the work. Students contributed by completing small yet time-consuming tasks, such as manual searching and defining search queries. Graduated dentists wrote the drafts of the articles and reviewed the students’ work to ensure its accuracy. Professors played a leadership role by guiding the projects and providing feedback and edits to the draft.
I had to coach students and teach them how to do the research. It taught me the value of empathy and the power of building strong relationships. I started to practice understanding of students. They had a lot were going on and they need some compassion. 

In April 2019, I signed up for voluntary work in a health start-up consultancy company as a designer of educational programs. That was when I realized I was capable of combining  my skills, experiences, knowledge, and interests. In other words, I was a research mentor, so I knew how to teach; I studied start-up principles and was passionate about creating something new and creative that brought joy to others. So, I designed a course in start-up principles taught by playing mini games. Working there and connecting to a different range of professionals helped me to gain a holistic view of health, business, and technology. Also, I explored areas outside my field and have exposed myself to novel insights into health, like the modern use of artificial intelligence for diagnosis. I tried to find out more about the financial and moral aspects of business in health, too.
As a dentistry student, I noticed health inequities when volunteering for underserved communities and did some oral health surveillance for children studying in schools located in underprivileged areas. But I touched on the reality of public health injustice when I started to work as a general dentist in a semi-deprived urban area. For example, I visit patients asking for tooth extraction because of acute pain they cannot afford to treat. On the other hand, some people ask for expensive cosmetic treatments that they do not need. 
Moreover, I visit patients in their twenties without even one intact tooth in their mouth because of the lack of proper education and unhealthy behaviors. Most of the time, the parents' bad economic status and illiteracy worsen the situation. 
Serving a diverse range of patients made me think about what I could do on my part. I started to educate each patient about their oral health and its effects on their overall health. I thought them how to brush and floss and described mouthwash benefits for stopping caries or preventing them. Although these are the obvious duties of oral hygienists and dentists, it was not routinely practiced in the area that I worked. Because we were the only dentists in that area with low pay and each of us must visit many patients every day, there was not enough time to do so. I knew I was making a very slight change compared to the routine practice, but I realized that it was worth sacrificing my earnings when I saw my patients coming back with a better oral hygiene status.
Some people found out about their chronic systemic diseases like high blood pressure when visiting dental clinics. I am aware that people's health issues are not restricted to oral health. Still, other measures need to be put in place to allow people to live with higher living standards.
I was facing some problems when contacting other health sectors, as well. For instance, I referred a 5-year-old patient with acute cellulitis to the nearby hospital but they refused to hospitalize the patient because they did not have an Oral Maxillofacial surgeon to order the injectable antibiotics needed. Therefore, I had to refer the patient to a hospital two hours away. As I mentioned, I have witnessed some voids in the healthcare system. 
I want to touch people's lives, and it is impossible through just dental visits.