On a dull night in Orlando, young Josh Flaum decides to experiment with drugs he can buy over the counter, and after Will Tran accidentally cheats his way to a high school math award, he has to grapple with whether or not to come clean.

Biologist Heather Hamlin leaves the safety of the lab for her first field assignment: tagging alligators, and as an unconsenting "face of diversity" at a statistics conference, Dan Simpson contemplates the role of his gay identity in his academic life.

In his last year of medical school in Colombia, Gabriel Duran Rehbein finds out his father has been kidnapped, and after seeing her dad lose control of his mind, art student Minerva Contreras decides to study the brain, in hopes of understanding him.

Barbara Abernathy has always felt at home in the ocean, but when she undergoes a bone marrow transplant, her doctor tells her she can't go into the water for a year, and with only two days to find and extract a sample from one of the oldest coral colonies in the world, Konrad Hughen finds himself at the bottom of the ocean with a broken drill bit.