The hospital can be an intimidating place, a place of anxiety and worry. Jessica Jiang (12) has taken it upon herself to change that. When you enter the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Kaiser Santa Clara Medical Center, she’ll be standing next to the door, waiting to say hello, a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye.

“The two things I know for sure about myself are that I like creating things and I like helping people,” Jessica said.

With hobbies and classes, she finds her own unique way to do both. One activity she partakes in is volunteering at a hospital in Santa Clara. 

“I meet a lot of other volunteers who come from different places that are not Harker,” Jessica said. “[It’s] really cool [to] meeting people who come from all over.”

Aside from her fellow volunteers, she has developed relationships with patients at the hospital.

“[I] get to meet a lot of very cool people who are patients and come from all sorts of backgrounds have been through all sorts of things,” Jessica said. “[I’ve met] people in the ICU, people who are mourning other people, people who are at the end of their lives. [In meeting them, I] listen to their outlooks on life and have conversations with them.”

She is also inspired by her own experience in the hospital from the summer between seventh and eighth grade when she was diagnosed with anorexia.

“I was getting really sick because of it, so I was hospitalized for a week,” she said. “The people in the hospital were exceptional. They were really kind, but I just felt extremely awkward whenever we were just sitting in silence.”

This experience drives her to reach out to everyone she meets, helping them feel comfortable and welcome.

“I [often] stand near the entrances of the hospital and greet everyone who passes. I tried [to] say hi or have a good day or take care [of] everyone who passes by,” she said. “For me, it’s important that I make conversation with other people, so I’ll try to do that with strangers.”

She applies what she’s learned from the hospital to her classes and hobbies, including the Honors Human Anatomy and Physiology class.

“It’s really cool to learn where everything is in the human body,” she said. “I’m trying to learn human anatomy like bones and muscles and [how they facilitate] movement. What’s really interesting to me is how we design things that fit our bodies.”

She further applies this knowledge to sewing clothes, a hobby she first attempted for her junior year prom. She tried sewing her own dress, a lofty goal for a beginner seamstress.

“I didn’t have time to hem the ends,” Jessica said. “I think it looks pretty nice, on the whole. It just wasn’t quite done.”

It didn’t turn out exactly how she wanted it to, but she enjoyed the process nonetheless. To Jessica, “creating things” is the appeal of most of her hobbies, including orchestra. Despite her inexperience, she maintains her positive outlook, seeing the process as a learning experience.

“In ninth grade, my mom persuaded me to sign up for orchestra. I thought I would hate it,” she said. “I didn’t play the oboe at that time, [but] it turned out alright. For the first half of ninth grade, I was really just playing by myself and practicing during orchestra, because I didn’t know how to play. I’m sure I was very, very out of tune, but that’s gotten better.”

Beyond creating, Jessica enjoys reading, writing fiction, and even — occasionally — writing essays.

“I actually have come to appreciate writing essays because of the work and the planning that goes into them,” she said. “I like going through every little thing and seeing how different themes connect to each other, even across stories, across experiences across themes. An essay can bring out the universal.”

Her eyes lit up as she described her favorite book, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

“It’s a collection of little vignettes about different impossible cities,” she said, smiling thoughtfully. “These can be fantastical like the city that’s hung between two mountains or the city on the moon that grows lighter and lighter and isn’t bound by gravity.”

There’s one unique city that she feels applies well to her life: Ersilia, in which relationships are represented by colorful strings, stretched across the expanse of the city.

“The city isn’t really the people — it’s the strings that go from house to house,” she said. “When the strings become too numerous for people to walk across to walk in the streets, then the people pack up and they move. Even then, the city isn’t the people, but rather, what they’ve left behind, the different connections. To me, that was just really cool.”

She applies this to her own life and relationships, according to Emily Liu (12), her orchestral companion of four years.

“We got closer by talking about random topics, like if there’s something interesting that we learned in class,” Emily said. “She likes to bake sometimes, [so] she’ll talk about [something] she tried making.”

She’s infamous for her baking, according to Nerine Uyanik (12), whether it’s “a tray of 30 something macho black sesame macarons or a variety of cookies or whole cheesecake.”

“I have come to see that Jessica really values and knows how to use her time. Jessica spends her school hours very productively, often using office hours or lunch to practice in the RPAC, which means that I don’t get to see her around a lot at school,” Nerine said. “But, that also means that the time we do spend together is very meaningful and cherished by us both. And whether Jessica catches lizards during a hike, or picks wild blackberries from her backyard, I’m grateful to see more and more of her quirky human self.”

Although she emphasizes her schoolwork, these relationships are an essential aspect of her life.

“I honestly think that the most important part about being a person is not who you are, but the connections you have and what happens within those connections,” Jessica said. “I think that, to me, is where the magic happens. No one’s really an island.”