Jeremias Castillo accepts the 2023 NHS National Scholarship from NASSP CEO Ronn Nozoe.

Scholarship, Service, Leadership, and Character. The four pillars of National Honor Society (NHS) are a great responsibility and definitely no joke. Every high school student inducted into NHS must uphold these pillars and make them a part of their everyday lives. It’s a serious commitment that I didn’t take lightly. Yet, I never imagined that one day NASSP would find that I embodied all four of them in such a way that I was deserving of the 2023 NHS National Scholarship.

Winning the scholarship was a shock—especially to me. How could a disadvantaged, first-​generation, low-income Dominican boy living in Newark, NJ, go from losing his father during his sophomore year of high school to being the national winner of an incredibly competitive scholarship? How could a boy with no father make it into three Ivy League institutions with two full-ride scholarships to Harvard and Yale and more than $275,000 in external scholarships?

My answer to these questions is that I claimed my pain as a part of my experience—not as a deterrent from what I wanted to experience. Ultimately, I turned my pain into my purpose. I decided to channel my grief over my father’s death into reaching new heights and safeguarding the future of my community. I realized that if I wanted to see the change I longed for, I needed to first become that change.

Becoming a Public Health Advocate

On May 27, 2021, my father passed away from cardiac arrest. About two months prior, he had a stroke and was transported to the local hospital. There, over the course of a week, my family and I realized just how important it is to advocate for patient care. When my father was discharged from the hospital (New Jersey Charity Care had paid for his stay), he was sent home with instructions to eat healthier if he wanted to live a longer, more fulfilling life. But soon after he got home, he collapsed on the floor. I was there with him and heard his last breath.

This direct encounter with health disparities made me realize that my experience was not unique. Inadequate access to health care was something that I had grown up hearing about all my life, but I never thought much about it until its force came knocking on my family’s door. My father’s last wish was for me to apply to a highly selective internship at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, which I did; I was admitted, sharing his story.

During this internship, I learned a lot more about the social determinants of health—factors that collectively determine a person’s health both inside and outside of the clinical setting in an intertwined fashion. I also had the opportunity to present my own research on a health disparity of my choice that was prevalent in Essex County, NJ, in which Newark is the county seat. I chose kidney disease. Seeing the alarming rates of this condition along with many others in regions with primarily minority demographics showed me that although the United States is one of the wealthiest countries, it has tremendous poverty with people living in deplorable conditions like those in some third-world countries. The deficits in the American health care system and its impact on the lives of disadvantaged families and individuals across the nation motivated me to make a change in my community.

Waging War Against Health Disparities Everywhere

Becoming the change that I wanted to see in my community started with me volunteering at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, NJ, where my father had been admitted at the time of his stroke. There, I volunteered two hours every Friday evening and took care of patients in the same-day surgery, post-operative room. While the contribution might seem minimal, I was able to help take care of patients and make them feel more at home with a familiar face among the uniform-clad staff.

My efforts also extended beyond the hospital. In partnership with Leaders of the 21st Century, a nonprofit organization, I helped coordinate an annual toiletry drive for two consecutive years that collected well over 2,000 gallon-sized toiletry bags for the Newark Department of Health and Community Wellness. I also served as a keynote speaker for a food-insecurity symposium for the city of Newark, and I organized a career-readiness workshop to raise awareness of available career options and pathways for high school students and other individuals within my community.

During my junior year of high school, I competed in a statewide Stand & Deliver speech competition. Although I lost during the first round, Steve Adubato, a television broadcaster and chief executive officer for the nonprofit organization that runs the competition, saw my passion for mitigating health disparities. He gave me the opportunity to be featured on the final annual airing of “Lessons in Leadership” on News 12+ to speak further on the topic to a television audience of more than 3.6 million households.

In addition to my advocacy, I’ve also engaged in this issue on an academic level. I have conducted neuroscientific research in affiliation with Pioneer Academics, an online research institute for high school students, by working with a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, studying the role of inflammation in neuropathological disorders and bringing attention to health disparities based on demographics.

Winning the NHS scholarship has made not only my family proud but also my hometown. In fact, Teresa Ruiz, the New Jersey Senate Majority Leader, invited me to the state capitol in Trenton for the passage of a ceremonial resolution where I was commended for my contributions toward public health advocacy in my community.

Today, the Dominican boy mourning his father’s death and not knowing how he would pay for college is Jeremias Elias Castillo, a freshman at Harvard University and part of its inaugural cohort of the Rising Scholars Program. All it took was turning the pain of my father’s death into pursuing my dream of becoming a neurosurgeon—my purpose now. 

Jeremias Castillo is a freshman at Harvard University. A graduate of Technology High School in Newark, NJ, he is the 2023 NHS Scholarship National Winner.