Bailey Thompson

My name is Bailey Thompson and I am a fourth year undergraduate student completing my B.S. in Human Biology and a B.A. in Spanish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My time as an undergraduate has allowed me to pursue an expansive range of potential professional interests, through experiences in research, physician shadowing, and study abroad. Through these opportunities, I have found that my interests lie at the question of how often inexorable socioeconomic factors manifest in health at the molecular, individual, and community level. I aim to gain more patient exposure and partake in an internship that allows me to delve into the intersection of environmental (both physical and figurative) factors and their implications on human health. With this inclination, I hope to graduate in June of 2025 and pursue either my Master’s Degree in Education or take a gap year working as an EMT while I prepare for medical school. 

Over the course of fulfilling my degree, I have taken several classes to hone my knowledge of the varying influences that play a role in one’s overall wellbeing. These courses, ranging from Environmental Health Science to Biochemistry to Research Deconstruction, exposed me to the critical skill set required to analyze and achieve public health goals on a holistic scale. My public health course challenged me to think outside of my comfort zone in answering political questions related to lawmaking and public health policies. This has cultivated my stronger understanding of, for example, the complex decisions that need to be made in order to accommodate a certain budget while prioritizing the most pressing risk factors. Through my Research Deconstruction course, I learned firsthand the process of reading and comprehending scientific literature, and have practiced cultivating questions that further the research at hand. Perhaps the most influential was Environmental Health Science, which presented to me an extensive analysis of the various environmental exposures humans are faced with–at a multitude of levels–everyday. These are the elements citizens have such little control over, yet will not only harm them the most, but also their descendants for generations to come. This, I believe, is one of the most crucial pillars of addressing health on a global scale, which I have begun to further study as a member of the Chamorro-Garcia Lab, which focuses on the epigenetic inheritance and transgenerational impacts of environmental exposures.

My time as an undergraduate has allowed me to further build my cultural competency. This past fall quarter, I had the privilege of studying abroad in Barcelona, with the goal of fostering my Spanish language skills, cultural understanding, and overall worldviews. I was presented with a unique internship opportunity in which I taught English to local Spaniards. Through this experience, I was not only able to bridge the gap in my understanding between English and Spanish, but through pedagogy I also fostered my communication skills and cultural competency, something I believe will be especially valuable in relaying research findings with the rest of the scientific community. Being able to address the healthcare needs of a wider audience of patients is one of my highest priorities in relation to my Spanish language skills. 

As I continue on my undergraduate academic journey, I hope to obtain an internship position where I can strengthen my interdisciplinary understanding of healthcare, and after I earn my Bachelor’s degrees, apply these experiences to pursue a Master's in Education and work to close the achievement gap in the life sciences, and eventually obtain my MD. I hope to continue to fine tune my Spanish language and communication skills as well as develop my own cultural philosophy pertaining to how vastly the image of health can differ across communities, which I intend to implement as I take on future endeavors as a healthcare professional.