A Note from Me to You: Saying Goodbye to DNA and Duke

As you all know, I just graduated! AND Oh wow what a ride we have had! I will miss you all so so much. I will miss your text/email suggestions for future meetings, I will miss spending every Tuesday and Thursday night connecting with you all and debating reaI issues that matter to us, I will miss our quiet hour study sessions, I will miss most of all the emails you guys send me at the end of every semester thanking me for the community and belonging DNA has given you. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, I will miss this group and this club most of all once I leave Durham. Please never stop being curious and always reach out <3.

Some more about my story and founding DNA in Jan 2023:

I founded DNA the spring of my freshman year. I was 20, I had just started getting seriously sick, and I didn't have language yet for what was happening to my body. I knew I was struggling. I knew other people around me were struggling in ways the university wasn't designed to address. And I had enough stubbornness, or maybe enough desperation, to think that starting something might help.

What I didn't know was that it would become the most important thing I did at Duke.

I want to be honest with you all about what these three years actually looked like, because you deserve to know the full picture of what you were part of.

Freshman year I was building DNA while my body was quietly failing in ways no one could yet explain. I had constant vertigo, fatigue, migraines, and pain that didn't show up clearly in labs. I was referred to seven specialties. I waited. I kept running meetings because DNA was one of the few things that made me feel like myself when my body felt like a stranger. Junior year, before I had seen a single specialist, I was emergency evacuated to the hospital with kidney failure. It turned out I had lupus that had gone unrecognized and untreated for nearly two years. By the time anyone caught it, it had already reached my kidneys.

I am telling you this not for sympathy but because you need to understand what it meant that you all kept showing up to meetings.

There were sessions this year I couldn't lead because I was sick. Some of you stepped in without being asked. You pulled up the papers, you ran the discussion, you sent me notes afterward. You treated DNA like it was yours too, because it was. It is. It always was more yours than mine.

What we built together is something I am genuinely proud of. We changed Duke's attendance policy after three years of pushing — a structural change that will protect students long after any of us are gone. We opened a sustained line of communication with the SDAO that didn't exist before. We grew to over seventy members. We spent a year reading hard science and asking harder questions about whose bodies institutions are built for and who pays when the answer is wrong. We did all of that in a room on Tuesday and Thursday nights with tea and snacks and a level of intellectual honesty I have rarely encountered anywhere else at Duke.

More than any of that: you were a community that made me feel less alone in something that can be very isolating. Being chronically ill and neurodivergent in an institution that moves fast and expects consistency is exhausting in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven't lived it. You got it. You didn't need the explanation. That mattered more than I know how to say.

I am heading into my gap year before applying to medical school in May 2027. I am going into medicine because of everything I experienced as a patient — the diagnostic uncertainty, the years of not being believed, the moment a physician finally paused and said I believe you. I want to be that physician. DNA taught me, over and over, what it means to build spaces where people feel heard. I am taking that with me.

To whoever leads DNA next: you are inheriting something real. The relationships, the reform wins, the reading list, the Tuesday night regulars who come back every week because this room gives them something they can't find elsewhere. Take care of it. Keep making the scientific case. Keep pushing Duke. Keep changing things one policy at a time.

And to everyone who showed up this year, especially the ones who stepped up when I couldn't: thank you. Not in the way you thank people at the end of a club year. In the way you thank people who were actually there.

I love this group. I am so proud of what we have made.

With love,

Devon Tonneson