Philanthropy powers sophomore on path to medical career

As a standout baseball player and star student at Beauregard High School, Carter Dees was sure his future included playing collegiate baseball. 

That is until a rare autoimmune disease emerged in his final years of high school and wreaked havoc on his body. It was virtually impossible for him to keep food down, causing him to lose almost 50 pounds.

“My diet was pretty much rice and plain chicken. Then it got to the point where I couldn't eat rice or chicken, and I was living off green peas and oatmeal,” said Dees, now a sophomore at Auburn University. “My body just could not take anything else.”

As his senior year passed, the doctor’s appointments and hospital stays mounted, and so did the questions. A diagnosis was elusive. And to make matters worse, some of his doctors didn’t really listen to him and insisted that he had an eating disorder.

The ordeal was taxing mentally and physically.

While the health challenges kept Dees away from the baseball field, he persevered in the classroom and excelled, eventually graduating as Beauregard’s valedictorian in 2023 despite 60 check-outs and absences his senior year due to the illness.

With a collegiate baseball career out of the picture, Dees began researching college options in earnest. Despite his grandmother and parents being Auburn alumni, Auburn wasn’t initially at the top of his list.  

“I've been here my whole life, and I felt like I knew what Auburn was. But then I took a tour and my whole perspective changed,” he said. “I could feel the energy around campus. I could see that people were happy, unlike some of the other colleges I toured. That’s when I decided that I was coming here.”

That tour, coupled with a financial aid package that covered his full tuition, helped Dees choose Auburn over Vanderbilt and Baylor. The generosity of the Auburn Family in creating scholarships for students like Dees was pivotal in bringing him to the Plains as a student.

 

During that time, Dees finally got a diagnosis: eosinophilic esophagitis, an immune disease that causes inflammation of the esophagus due to food triggers.

Slowly, Dees has been able to experiment with different foods and find out what works for him and what doesn’t. He’s regained the weight he lost and follows a strict diet to avoid problematic foods, such as soy, gluten, rice, wheat, corn, chicken and certain types of oils, among others.

Today, he’s excelling as a double major in biochemistry and microbial biology and as a peer instructor helping new students in the First Year Seminar program. After Auburn, he plans to attend medical school to become a surgeon – a career goal that has been shaped by his own medical ordeal.

“That's been my driving force,” he said. “When I apply to medical school and I’m asked why I want to do medicine, I'm going to talk about the journey I went through and why it’s such a big deal to me to be able to help other people so that they don't have to deal with what I went through.”

With plans to undertake the enormous expense of medical school, Dees is on track to graduate from Auburn debt free thanks to the Auburn Family’s philanthropy. One important scholarship for Dees has been the Carl and Jessie Summers Scholarship, which was made possible by the late couple’s estate gift in support of students from rural Lee County.

“Words can't describe how appreciative I am of the Summers family and everyone who has supported my education,” Dees said. “Having my undergraduate tuition paid is going to make my life so much easier. It takes special people to leave money in support of someone they don’t know and will never meet.”