May graduate Sara Williams is gaining clinical experience while working as a medical assistant at Mercy while she prepares to apply to medical school. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
After weeks of training, Sara Williams has been settling into her new role as a medical assistant with Mercy health system.
Williams, who earned her degree in biochemistry and biotechnology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis in May, has been working one-on-one with a doctor in an affiliated primary care practice and learning skills such as how to triage patients, take vital signs and discuss prescriptions or answer questions about refills. She’s hoping to also get exposure to family medicine or pediatric practices.
“It’s like an inside look at the medical field,” Williams said. “I’m just learning and getting those clinical experiences and getting the hands-on skills that I would need and make sure that this is something I want to do, making sure that this is for me, that medicine is where I want to be.”
Early reviews suggest that it is.
Williams has been drawn to the idea of becoming a physician – possibly a surgeon – since she was a child growing up in Nassau, Bahamas. She came to UMSL to put her on the path toward making that dream a reality.
She arrived at the university in 2022, attracted by a new partnership between UMSL and the Ministry of Education in The Bahamas. She was part of a cohort of 20 students from the island country who were involved in the Public School Scholars Programme or received the National Tuition Assistance Scholarship to help facilitate their studies in the United States.
“I wanted a different experience,” Williams said of choosing to leave home for higher education. “If I went to college back home, there’s one big university there, and I felt like it would have been like high school. You see a lot of the same people, because it’s a small island, so I wanted a new experience.”
She had almost no knowledge of St. Louis, but she liked what she learned about the offerings and opportunities at UMSL, including affordable tuition through the partnership, smaller class sizes provided by the Pierre Laclede Honors College and strong service support in the Office of Admissions.
The presence of other Bahamian students provided some peace of mind to her and her family as she made the adjustment to a new city and a different culture and pace of life.
Williams said she did find an immediate sense of community with her fellow compatriots, a few of whom graduated from the same high school that she did.
“At the time, having those people there felt really comforting,” she said. “We were all going through a lot of the same things. We were all missing home. We all came from the same place, so when we wanted to speak how we usually would at home, we could do that with each other. We’d have dinners together, hang out, and there was just a sense of community. I think we really became a family here.”
But Williams didn’t stick to a clique. She found nearly everyone she met to be welcoming and bonded with many of the other international students from outside The Bahamas.
“I made some of my best friends, who are French,” she said. “They’re in France now. That’s really cool. How odd is it that I’m from The Bahamas and you’re from France, and now we’re friends. What are the odds that we’ve met each other and made such good relationships with each other?”
Williams made a point to get involved on campus, working early on as an international orientation leader with UMSL Global, helping to welcome other students from abroad and ease their transition as they navigated language and cultural barriers. She continued to have jobs with UMSL Global throughout her time on campus, and she also served as a peer mentor for six semesters in the Honors College.
Her own classes in the Honors College enhanced her overall experience. She chose to study biochemistry and biotechnology, but she appreciated getting to take discussion-based classes, often outside her major, that pushed her to think in new and different ways.
Williams believed biochemistry and biotechnology would give her a good mix of biology and chemistry, but it wound up being much more.
“It’s been pretty challenging,” she said. “But it’s kind of cool to know how the body works and things influencing not only the body but the world at large.”
Her classes with Associate Professor Lon Chubiz resonated with her, and she wound up learning even more when she joined his research lab. She worked closely with doctoral student Danish Gul.
“We basically used metagenomics and lipidomics to screen for these hard-to-find bacteria or hard-to-isolate bacteria,” she said. “There’s not much research done on it. So initially, what we were trying to do is see from these soil samples if we were able to grow them, because they grow really slowly, and their nutrient requirements are pretty specific in comparison to like E coli or some other type of bacteria. We were able to grow them in certain ways.”
She gained experience with mass spectroscopy and using centrifuges, and she presented her work as a junior at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.
Williams has no doubt her research experience deepened her learning. She hopes it will also strengthen her application for medical school. She’s planning to spend the next year preparing for the MCAT when she’s not working in her medical assistant position, and she aims to apply for medical schools both in the United States and the Caribbean.
She is still deciding on an intended specialty. In addition to surgeon, she’s considered being an OB-GYN.
“It has an element of surgery to it and also women’s health, and that’s something I’m really passionate about as well,” she said. “Those are things I’m thinking about.”
She had no regrets about her time at UMSL.
“The four years flies by so quickly, but I’m glad I came here,” Williams said. “I don’t think I have anything bad to say. Maybe the weather.
“Overall, I’ve had a great experience. I’ve met a lot of great people, and I think I’ve made the best out of it. I’m really proud of myself, and I feel like my family’s proud of me as well.”
