Magazine

“I’m always trying to fit each thing that I’m doing into this larger puzzle.”

Since its founding, St. Olaf’s emphasis on vocation has helped those in its community discover their place in the world. To understand the prismatic ways that students, alumni, and faculty think about vocation in their own lives, we spoke to Oles in an array of different positions and places in their lives to understand what propels them and how they stay true to their values — in their own words.

Dick Nchang ’25 is a quantitative economics major from Cameroon. He is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Sickle Cell International Foundation and was named a Future Nobel Laureate Scholar by the Nobel Prize Museum and EF Education First. Read his reflection below.

I was born with sickle cell disease, a painful blood disease that caused episodes where I could be hospitalized for up to two months at a time, about four times a year. In 2016, I underwent a yearlong bone marrow transplant, which was successful.

I had crossed the Rubicon, but I thought: how can I help others who are going through this? How can we share experiences? So I started a foundation. I reached out to family members, to hospitals, and other potential funders. I wrote a letter to Turkish Airlines, which agreed to a partnership. Today, the Sickle Cell International Foundation has supported more than 140 families, and we’ve saved them $75,000 in medical expenses.

I want to cure this disease once and for all, and so for me, I am always trying to fit each thing that I’m doing into this larger puzzle. 

For example, I saw there was a lab at Stanford University that had received funding to work on a gene therapy cure for sickle cell. I sent the lab’s principal investigator, Matthew Porteous, an email, and he got back to me almost instantly. We talked for an hour about working together. 

When I was working on a population model as part of a gene therapy treatment idea, I kept running into brick walls. One thing I did was plead with my statistics professor, Associate Professor of Practice in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Joseph Roith, to give me five minutes at the beginning of his class to pitch the specific problem I was working on to all of his students. I said: “Please join me. You will be surprised what you are capable of. Let’s see how it works.” Now, I’m working with five other students on a paper that I am hoping will be published by the end of the year. And I just wrapped up a Summer of Science internship in Biomedical Research at Novartis, leading a comprehensive analysis on the barriers and enablers to state-of-the-art gene therapies for sickle cell disease in Africa.

The questions I ask myself are: Am I doing the most I can do? Am I challenging myself enough? I always want to figure out what’s next.