Jeremy Hernandez is a first-generation college graduate from UC Berkeley aspiring to become a surgeon. He majored in integrative biology and is currently taking a gap year to experience some independence outside of school while pursuing other opportunities. He is proud to say he was born and raised in East Los Angeles and although he didn't grow up in the easiest circumstances, he believes everything happens for a reason and his environment only fueled his dedication to become a physician one day.
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There are journeys we choose and journeys that choose us. Jeremy Hernandez, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in integrative biology, has discovered that the most profound travels often occur within the smallest distances: the space between a caregiver's hand and a patient's need, the gap between what we plan for ourselves and what life asks of us.
Growing up in East Los Angeles, Jeremy learned early that circumstances do not define destiny. They merely sketch the preliminary map. What matters is how we navigate the terrain we're given, and more importantly, how we choose to accompany others through theirs. His path toward becoming a surgeon began not in a lecture hall or laboratory, but in the intimate geography of his grandfather's care.
For more than a year now, Jeremy has worked with Careyaya, providing care for individuals above sixty whose needs vary as widely as their life stories. Some require only companionship, their memories grown unreliable, their cognitive maps redrawn by time. Others need the full compass of assistance: meals prepared, bodies helped to move, exercises guided, medications remembered. What unites all these encounters is Jeremy's understanding that being a caregiver means being present for anything, everything, while ensuring that comfort and happiness remain the true north of every interaction.
The work demands what all meaningful work demands: attention to the particular. Each person brings their own landscape of requirements, their own weather of moods and difficulties. Jeremy has learned to read these subtle geographies, to develop what he calls "bedside manner" but what might better be described as a kind of emotional cartography. He has cultivated attentiveness, that rarest of modern virtues. He has learned to devise creative solutions, to improvise when the expected route proves blocked.
But it is the stories that have moved him most deeply. In listening to the adventures, struggles, and achievements of those he assists, Jeremy has found not just case studies but companions. Their narratives have fueled his passion for medicine, revealing to him that becoming a physician means offering others the chance to live comfortably, to experience all that makes us human. It is, he recognizes, a privilege to facilitate such journeys.
There was a moment, arriving at a particularly difficult juncture in his own life, when Jeremy felt lost in his own geography. He was caring for someone who looked over at him and said, without preamble, that he felt God had brought Jeremy into his path, that he was grateful for his presence. The words arrived like coordinates when you've misplaced your map. They reminded Jeremy why he had chosen this direction in the first place: to help others. His own problems seemed suddenly smaller, more navigable.
This recognition connects directly to why Jeremy chose caregiving. His grandparents had been central figures in his life's landscape. When his grandfather needed care, Jeremy provided it, not as burden but as natural extension of love received and returned. He witnessed his family's struggle to balance work, life, and caregiving. He understood viscerally what many families endure, and he wanted to be someone they could rely on when they could not be there themselves. The personal became the professional became the vocational.
For those considering this path, Jeremy offers advice tempered by experience: practice patience and compassion. Many of those we assist cannot advocate for themselves, and frustration becomes their lingua franca. The caregiver's task is to listen, to understand, to see through their eyes how maddening it must be when the body or mind no longer obeys. It means holding yourself accountable to the highest possible standard of care. It means recognizing that this is rewarding work, that it creates meaningful connections with people whose lives intersect briefly but significantly with your own. His final counsel is simple: just go for it.
Between his undergraduate years and medical school, Jeremy is taking time to experience what he calls "some independence outside of school," pursuing opportunities that will only enrich his eventual practice. He carries East Los Angeles with him, not as limitation but as foundation. He understands that everything happens for a reason, even if we discern that reason only retrospectively. His environment did not constrain his dedication to becoming a physician. It intensified it.
There are countless routes to medicine, countless motivations for choosing to heal. Jeremy Hernandez has chosen the path that runs through presence, through listening, through the small daily acts that constitute care. He has learned that the distance between caregiver and patient is the distance between one human being and another, which is to say, no distance at all. Just the infinite space of compassion, waiting to be crossed.