I was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, the kind of place where you’re close enough to the wilderness to get your hands dirty but still live within city limits. I’m one of four sisters in a family that spent weekends at our dry cabin outside Talkeetna, Alaska, hauling water and playing in the woods. Alaska’s mix of independence and tight-knit community shaped how I saw the world early on.

Arianna Lee, MD ’24

Finding purpose on the water

At 17, I started commercial fishing out of Cordova, a small coastal fishing town in southcentral Alaska. I wasn’t sure what came next after high school, but I knew I wasn’t ready for college.

I wanted to do something that mattered. Fishing gave me something I hadn’t found in the classroom: hands-on, challenging work that demanded both resilience and teamwork.

I quickly learned how to work with people who were nothing like me. We fished for salmon for weeks at a time: long days, early mornings and backbreaking work. But I loved it. Work hard, catch fish, eat, sleep, repeat. I fished every summer until I was about 25.

Those summers taught me how to push through discomfort, solve problems in the moment and earn trust on the job. They also gave me time to think — a lot of it. Working on the deck for hours, I had space to reflect. I made some of my biggest life decisions out there, between tides and tosses of the net. Somewhere in those long, quiet shifts, I started to think about medicine. I never expected salmon fishing to prepare me for a career in medicine, but for me, they are intimately intertwined. Both require a foundation of trust to facilitate communication and teamwork to steer through difficulties.

From fish biology to human medicine

After taking a year off after high school, I enrolled in college in southeast Alaska, thinking I’d study fish biology. I was part of a lab studying how pollution affected liver enzymes in groundfish. But I realized I cared less about the fish and more about the people. I became more interested in how those pollutants affect the humans who ate the fish.

That shift in thinking pushed me in a new direction. I transferred to Montana State University and began taking more human biology courses, and to my surprise, I discovered I was a strong student when the subject mattered to me.

Around the same time, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. He had to relocate to Seattle for nearly a year for treatment at UW Medicine, including a bone marrow transplant. Helping care for him changed everything. It showed me how important it is to have doctors who truly care. I saw how healing isn’t just about medicine; it’s also a relationship between a patient, their family and their care team.

Learning medicine the rural way

After college, I took a job at a small clinic in Naknek, Alaska, a town of about 800 that swells to thousands during fishing season. It was 2020, and I was hired to help launch a COVID-19 testing program.

It turned out to be a crash course in rural healthcare. I was drawn to the intimacy of small-town medicine. In a place where patients knew the staff by name, everyone pitched in where they could, and you learned to do a little bit of everything. And this led to another job as a medical student in Cordova’s medical clinic, where I felt such purpose in caring for my neighbors.

My first time applying to medical school didn’t pan out. But I am so grateful for the extra year of life I had before medicine, to continue building community in Cordova. It was a rare opportunity to step back and examine the experiences that crafted my personality and motivation. That extra year gave me invaluable hands-on experience and reaffirmed my desire to serve as a physician.

I applied again, and this time I was accepted to the UW School of Medicine and its WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho) Alaska program and never looked back.

Finding my place

Being able to train through Alaska’s WWAMI program was a major reason I chose the UW School of Medicine. Staying close to home lets me serve the communities I care about while building the skills I’ll need to support them long-term.

Being a TRUST scholar (Targeted Rural Underserved Track) has been the highlight of my time in medical school. The program places students in rural communities for long-term training; my site is Kodiak, Alaska. I visit several times a year and then return for a full month in the summer. Each time, I feel more connected to the clinic and the community. It’s the kind of medicine I want to practice — long-term, relational and deeply rooted in place. I am looking forward to spending 6 months there later this year for a longitudinal clinical experience.

Switching from full-time work back to the classroom, my first year was not easy. My wonderful, like-minded classmates became my life-long friends and support network. Along with my cohort, I’ve had great mentors along the way: Ben Head, MD ‘16, in Cordova, and Katie Gray, MD, in Kodiak. Both have shown me what it means to commit to a place and its people.

I am still torn on exactly which specialty I’ll pursue. Family medicine still speaks to me, but my third-year rotations have opened my eyes to other paths. What I do know is that I’ll return to rural Alaska. And while school is exciting, hard and taxing, I thankfully still have some time to return home to Cordova on my breaks, most recently reconnecting with the water by going shrimping with my partner.

Why scholarships matter

I’m a first-generation medical student, and scholarships have made this journey possible. Thanks to scholarships, I can focus on learning, not just surviving. I also have the freedom to pursue a path in rural medicine instead of chasing a high-paying specialty.

Scholarships help build a healthcare system that reflects the people it serves. When future doctors come from diverse backgrounds, they can bring knowledge to the table, which makes our entire system stronger.

Thanks to UW Medicine and the generous support of donors, I am on that path. I am proud to be part of a program that invests in students like me and in the future of healthcare across the Pacific Northwest.

For me, becoming a doctor is about giving back. Alaska is beautiful, but rural life can be hard. Challenges like limited access to health care, high costs and geographical isolation take a toll. I want to be a doctor who understands the challenges and stays through them.

And hopefully, if all goes well, I’ll be back in Cordova. Committed to caring for my community. Showing up for the people who call it home.

As told to Patsy Cadwell