Michelle Lanuza has her sights set on a career designing communication systems for airplanes, yet each new opportunity comes with the same obstacle: her immigration status, and for Saba Banaian, the opportunity to study biomedical engineering in the United States comes with a painful cost: she can't return home to Iran for five years.

Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet, and Patrick Honner starts to doubt his lifelong love of math when graduate school becomes a lonely experience.

Keren Landman always wanted to be a writer, but her family didn’t see it as a practical career — so instead, she went to medical school, and when Adithi Ramakrishnan gets to college, she only sees two career paths ahead of her: medical school or scientific research.

As a teenager, Mike McFadden realizes one part of his body isn’t developing like the other boys his age, and Ricky Ortiz believed that to be a good husband, father, and provider, he could never show weakness.

When the children’s TV show host Carly Ciarrocchi is assigned a scuba diving episode, she’s forced to confront a lifelong fear of the ocean, and growing up, Darcie Little Badger was wary of the ocean. But when she takes an oceanography class in college, she begins to question her fears.

When Bailey Swilley’s dad goes into cardiac arrest, she watches her mom care for him and starts to reevaluate what love really looks like, at rock bottom, Pam Stepansky turns to her dad for support with her alcoholism.

When everyone in Rich Tackenberg’s family is diagnosed with celiac disease, he’s forced to confront a terrifying possibility: life without his emotional support carb, and during the pandemic, Aditya Surendran sets out to conquer making a 36-hour baguette.

After a pregnancy loss, Annie Tan channels her grief into rescuing an injured mockingbird, and Kibby McMahon is convinced she can will her way into pregnancy, but her body refuses to follow the plan.

When Ph.D student Ali Mattu's girlfriend tells him she is moving to New York City, he has to make some tough decisions about where home is, and Arlo Pérez Esquivel struggles to define his boundaries with his father while he is pursuing his education in another country.

Gwendolyn Napier is left heartbroken when harsh Atlanta weather destroys the trees planted to honor her family members, and Bimini Wright looks back on her childhood spent aboard a research boat, studying tuna alongside her larger-than-life fisherman father.