My name is Jean O’Hanley. I’m a first-year student at Sudbury’s Laurentian University, in the Interdisciplinary Science program. I hope to have a career in medicine. I am enormously grateful for the 2024 UCBeyond scholarship that I was so fortunate to receive. It was a little overwhelming to learn that perfect strangers care enough about me and other JIA patients not only to recognize our particular challenges, but to spend their time and energy raising funds to help us deal with the daunting expense of post-secondary education. Speaking of such challenges, and the constant need to rise to them, here’s the last line of the personal essay that I submitted for the UCBeyond Scholarship: “JIA may have won a few early battles, but I’m winning the war!”