Carolyn Rubenstein '07

Carolyn Rubenstein Boca Raton, Florida Major: Psychology

For Carolyn Rubenstein, summer camp shaped both her youth and what may well be her life's work -- helping cancer victims.

 

Her time at Duke has inspired her to expand her goals and broaden her interests.

 

Rubenstein was six when she first went with her parents to Camp Sunshine, owned by family friends, where young cancer patients spend a week in the Maine woods. Over the next seven years, her summer visits led to friendships with boys and girls who were losing their hair, getting used to wheelchairs or were otherwise marked by the radiation or chemotherapy they were enduring.

 

"I realized that they have fun in arts and crafts just like me. So what if they have no hair?" she says.

 

At 13, she created Carolyn's Compassionate Children (CCC) to link cancer patients with healthy peers in a pen pal program. Soon, pen pals were writing each other from a growing number of hospitals and clinics across the country. Before long, CCC began organizing annual school supply, holiday letter and gift drives.

 

At 15, Rubenstein made CCC a non-profit organization and began to raise funds to help childhood cancer survivors attend college. And at 17, she awarded, with the help of adult advisors, the first group of 15 scholarship winners, each of whom received up to $1,500. Sixty survivors have now received scholarships, about half have graduated and one is attending medical school.

 

"There are a lot of loopholes in the scholarship system, and aid for survivors is one. Treatment is so very expensive. Survivors' families may not have much left for college," Rubenstein says.

 

Rubenstein came to Duke believing, as she always had, that she would be a doctor. Her first course in psychology changed her plans. "Suddenly I was reading journals for fun," she says.

 

She now plans to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology, inspired by her work with assistant clinical psychiatry professor Melanie Bonner studying survivors and trauma and a year-long research project with Elizabeth Brannon, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, on infant cognition. Rubenstein also did a summer internship with Matthew Nock, director of Harvard's Center for Clinical Studies, that looked at young people who perform suicidal acts or injure themselves.

 

Now 21, she's also starting a program matching mentors who are survivors with new cancer patients. "Let's say Allison is 12 and is diagnosed with a type of leukemia. She can call a mentor, who is a survivor, and ask ‘What happens when my hair falls out? What did you do?' No one else can give comfort and support the way a mentor can," she says. Matt Ortiz, a survivor and Virginia Tech student, is working with her.

 

In early October, Rubenstein hired her first employee, Lauren Kahn '04, a third-year Duke medical student, to help part-time with a book that profiles 25 young cancer survivors.

 

"The working title is True Voices. -- These kids are superhuman. They have incredible stories. The book isn't about the treatments they went through so much as it is about the courage they've shown and the inspiration they give others," she says.

 

Rubenstein's work at Duke will culminate in an honors thesis studying survivors, their experience with loneliness and their mothers' burdens.

 

She says she has learned a great deal about resilience and endurance from her relationships with cancer survivors. "The cancer community is a small world, and you meet a lot of the people. You get stronger together. We come together when we lose someone."

 

They have inspired Rubenstein, who says, "When you have an idea, you don't put it down. My passion has just gotten stronger and stronger."