Valentine’s Day is a season of love. Some Oakland University students decided to give back to children during this special time of year.
Dylan Pillivant, a biology student, had always had a passion for working with children and writing. Last year, Morgan Carpenter, another student studying biology, approached Pillivant and pitched the idea of volunteering with sick children in the hospital.
Together, Carpenter and Pillivant came up with an idea to create a book and read it to the kids at the hospital. They wanted to create a book about medicine to educate the children but were careful to ensure it was not scary for them to read.
“It was kind of a mix of both of our ideas,” Pillivant said.
Carpenter described what inspired the pair to write the book.
“We are both passionate about medicine, we both want to be doctors,” Carpenter continued, “So, we were like, okay, we can combine all of our ideas together and make it something we both can contribute to and make it a cohesive project.”
The name of the book is “Feline Physicians”.
“We literally went through every animal. Well, actually the way we came up with cats is we were trying to come up with catchy titles.” Pillivant said.
Carpenter explains why the pair decided to depict animals in the book.
“It’s based on cats instead of humans, just so that it is more kid-friendly, and cute,” Carpenter said.
Pillivant and Carpenter went on to explain the story of the book.
“So it basically goes through all the different specialties, not all of them, but quite a few different specialties of doctors, it explains in simple terms what they do or different tests they use to help diagnose you,” Carpenter said.“We definitely have cute ideas for other books.”
The book roughly took about 8 months to create and the production costs were high.
“We aren’t making any profit from this. All the proceeds we make from book sales that we sell on Amazon go to repurchasing the book for a child so that we can donate to them at the children’s hospital,” Carpenter said.
But to Pillivant and Carpenter, it is not about the money.
“It is kind of expensive to do because we aren’t making any profit from it,” Carpenter continued, “But you know, it’s about the big picture. Helping the community and impacting the community.”
The design of the book was the next obstacle the pair had to surmount.
“We are biology, science people. We are not artists.” Carpenter said. “We found somebody on Thumbtack which is a website where you can hire different people to use different skills they have and we found an illustrator from the Ukraine actually. The designer and her whole team were amazing and they are very talented.”
With everything coming together, the pair’s next step is to share their book with the children they created it for.
“We just started volunteering at the hospital. We’ve started volunteering at the hospital, like in the playroom playing with the little kids but we haven’t had the opportunity to read it to them yet, but we will get there.” Carpenter said.
