You said you went to a high school that offered fencing, that must have been a pretty unique high school. >> Definitely, St. Benedict's Prep, one of the best, and the they offered a scholarship to reduce the normal fees, but you had to play a sport every single semester. It was asked of every student there, it's an all boys school. So I received a scholarship because of my chess and intellectual background, they said you would be an ideal candidate to be a student here, but you have to play a sport. So I tried out for the basketball team, and while I think I was somewhat amazing, I lacked the necessary skills and the height to keep up with our athletes that typically went off to Duke after leaving high school. So they gave me an opportunity to try fencing, which the recruiter told me was physical chess, and after that I was hooked. >> Okay, cool. So you played chess and you played physical chess and now you're playing social chess. >> Yep, exactly. [LAUGH] >> Can you tell me about some of the emotional issues that you were unprepared to deal with at first? >> So you just don't know everything. I mean you think you have a job, I'll give you a story. So I had recently been awarded a school improvement grant, been a part of a school improvement grant for a couple schools in the city of Detroit. So I was written into actually provide in school training to supplement some of their physical education, right. And a student just kept being late for class, she kept being late for class, this was in middle school. She couldn't have been, I think fifth grade or so, fifth or sixth grade, right. Fifth going into sixth grade, right, so we were elementary, middle. And she was late every day, every day, and so one day I just finally asked her, I just pulled her aside, and my tone was that kind of authoritarian like I've let you slide a couple times. Hey, why are you always late from this class, it's first thing in the morning? I was going off of some research I read at Duke showing that if you get kids physically active you actually increase their ability to learn their hardest subject right after. And so their next subject was math, right. And so we were working on that principle and testing to see if we can improve scores. And so it was critical that she was there in the morning, and so I really got into her and she kind of like shed a tear a little bit. And then told me that her friend was pulled into a house and kind of assault, I'm going to use other words, assaulted, a couple weeks ago. And so she ties her hair back, she looks more like a boy, and she takes different routes to school and she waits so that she could avoid walking past these abandoned houses where they were pulling kids in, pulling young women into. And so in Detroit you had a lot of abandoned homes on the east side, and this stuff that I knew. But because I just, my head wasn't in the space of living in that community and having to deal with those type of issues, she shouldn't have to deal with these type of issues in fifth and sixth grade either. That I had to check myself and realize that there are things that impede a student from learning and a students for may be. But you could have the best program in the world but there's real life and there's the environmental situations that actually go into the development of a program. And so me having to deal with her emotional trauma and what was real in her life, it far superseded what I needed in my program. And that's just one of many examples of just learning, just on the job learning that you have to go through. The people that you're working with, you care about them. You mean, you develop a real care, like these are my kids, and so to hear that and then to realize how just how much of an abrasive, just person I was because I was so concerned with you making it on time for my class that I didn't consider the environmental impacts of where she lived. So that's just one set of environmental issues that I, there's emotional issues that I had to deal with learning. >> Brianna had spent four years at the university on the college campus of 40,000 people without finding another person living with her same chronic conditions. And after one of our first pilots, we found another person, another young woman who also signed up and shared the same chronic conditions. And I think that story is something that she can tell from her experience how that was and,
