This is the fifteenth of 20 profiles of The Gazette’s Best and Brightest Class of 2017.

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When Aliza Anderson was 14, she became a teen volunteer at a local hospital. She noticed that all the nurses wore stethoscopes.

“I went online and found a pretty hot pink one for $7.26, ” she recalls. She didn’t use it, but wore it as she went about assigned tasks – helping with patient transport, stocking supplies and other odd jobs requested.

One day, a nurse, with the patient’s okay, let her listen to his heart.

“I heard the lub-dub. It was magical.” The man wanted to talk, so she sat quietly and listened to him tell stories about his love for his wife, grandchildren and garden.

Until that moment she had wanted to be a marine biologist, but as she immersed herself more into the medical world, she began to contemplate becoming a doctor.

Eventually, she was allowed to watch several procedures, including a femur reconstruction. She scrubbed in, and the nurses told her not to touch anything and if she started to feel faint to sit on the floor.

“It was certainly more real than the surgeries I watched on You Tube. But I made it. It was fascinating.”

She’s seen the more difficult aspects of medicine, helping with remembrance ceremonies for parents whose babies didn’t make it.

A senior at William J. Palmer High School, she found additional ways to show compassion. She started Best Buddies, to help special needs students participate more fully in school activities. She’s also been involved in the Restorative Justice program to mediate conflicts among students. “It’s another way to show respect and caring by listening,” she said.

She plans to be a doctor, helping in Third World countries.

She can also envision herself “holding a beating heart in my surgically gloved hands.”

She has not chosen a college yet, possibly Colby College in Maine, or Davidson College in North Carolina. Besides science classes, she wants to study cultural anthropology, Spanish, psychology, and neuroscience to strengthen her understanding of her patients, someday.

Since that first experience several years ago, she has listened to many heartbeats. “Each one is unique and beautiful,” she says.

She still wears the pink stethoscope.

“It’s a powerful reminder of that elderly gentleman whose heart I first heard, and how listening and caring can help healing.”