MONICA HAYS finance chair 2023-2024

Being one of the first members of my family to pursue a degree at an American University, a lot of things about college were unfoundedly foreign to me. I found myself overwhelmed trying to figure things out. However, I was not alone on my journey thanks to my amazing academic advisors and professors. I was excited to see all the things the University of Iowa had to offer. The honors program not only encouraged me to excel academically, but it has helped me pursue my never-ending interest in serving my community. 

I am the fundraising coordinator for Quench. I am also on the anti-racism committee for the Council on the status of women, and I am serving for RISE- AmeriCorps as an ESL director, and the presidential charter committee. I also get hands on, valuable health care experience as a psychiatric nursing assistant at the University of Iowa hospitals and clinics.

Summer semester, I started working with Dr. Catie Cherwin from the College of Nursing as a research assistant. Previously, I was quite intimidated by the idea of research before taking on this position. However, this position has given me many opportunities, such as becoming an Iowa bioscience academy (IBA) scholar. Prior to working in the lab, I had no experience in Gastrointestinal microbiome research. But with the guidance of Dr. Cherwin and PhD student Jemmie Hoang, I became comfortable and now I even started presenting about our research to my IBA journal club. My duties include recruiting participants, walking them through the research project and the role they play, as well as answering any questions they have. 

During recruitment I obtain consent from the participant and collect various samples while they fill out a demographics and symptoms questionnaire. I then enter all the data into our research database (Redcap). And with the samples, I go to the lab and process them for our collection of specimens. This experience has been an eye opening one. It has helped teach me leadership and communication skills because I have also been given the task to train some of our new research assistants as well which has been extremely exciting. Becoming a research assistant not only gave me insight about the work that research entails, but it gave me the passion to pursue research in my future endeavors and hopefully to pursue a dual MD/PhD degree.