Alexandra Clement

UConn School of Medicine, Class of 2021

I was born in Danbury, CT and raised in Newtown, CT.  I earned a BS in Microbiology with a minor in English from the University of California Santa Barbara, and an MS in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases from the George Washington University in Washington DC.

When I was 16 years old, I spent one month living in Ghana and volunteering in an orphanage. This began my interest in working with underserved communities. As an undergraduate student I volunteered with Street Health Outreach, an organization that performed weekend outreach activities to the homeless in the community surrounding the University of California Santa Barbara. Through this experience, I became involved with Doctors Without Walls-Santa Barbara Street Medicine, a non-profit organization providing free medical care to homeless people at park clinics and on street rounds. These opportunities revealed to me some of the challenges around health care homeless people in my community faced. In DC, I became involved with Whitman Walker Health, a clinic specializing in HIV care and LGBT health. There, I trained as an HIV-testing volunteer and began testing in the clinic as well as on the mobile health van.

The Urban Service Track chimes with my primary motivation for pursuing a career in public health and medicine: working with underserved populations. I pursued a degree in public health before applying to medical school because I believe that public health and medicine must come together to create sustainable change for vulnerable communities. My ultimate career goal is to combine my love of public health and medicine and to both treat individual patients and take part in community-level interventions. I believe UST is great preparation for this career path. The UST will also permit me to work with other health professionals similarly committed to providing exceptional health care to marginalized people.