After moving to a brand-new school in the seventh grade, Edith Gonzalez struggles to maintain her straight-A status with a new, scary biology teacher, and when social scientist Meltem Alemdar leaves her home in Turkey to pursue her education in the US, she struggles to find her identity.

As an irresponsible 17-year-old, Brian D. Bradley volunteers to spend two days living at the bottom of the ocean for a research study, and undergrad, Beryl Kahn takes a semester at sea after a bad breakup and gets rocked by the swells of the sea -- and her emotions.

A power outage on campus leads physics student Zoya Vallari to take a stand against her university's female-only curfew, and firefighter Nick Baskerville is eager to prove himself when he arrives on the scene of his first fire.

In the middle of a school day, science teacher Brittany Beck passes out in her classroom, leading her to reflect on what got her here, and inspired by her grandfather, Kitty Yang becomes a math teacher, but soon realizes she misses being a student.