Like many high school students in 2020, Columbia native Asia Smith got bored doing all her schoolwork from home.
“My junior year of high school I wanted to find something to do that was engaging outside of my schoolwork,” said Smith. “I saw a listing in my high school’s newsletter looking for minority high school students to participate in Zoom focus groups for a $45 Amazon gift card, so I signed up.”
What began as a way to fill quarantine time and get a gift card soon became something more to Smith. Through several Zoom sessions, Smith and her fellow participants explored issues surrounding minority student mental health, resources and stigma. By the end of the research study, Smith was a senior and had decided to go to Mizzou. David Aguayo, assistant research professor in the College of Education and Human Development, asked Smith if she would be interested in helping finish the study as she transitioned from high school to college.
Coincidentally, Hudson White, a student working on the project, was also a former high school classmate of Smith’s. Under the guidance of the researchers, Smith helped create a social media campaign to promote mental health resources for minority students, review foundational literature, process data for the study, and even contributed to writing the final paper, which was published in PubMed.
“Many, many nights of writing later, and a couple of submissions and revisions, and eventually we got published,” said Smith. “Thinking back, I really didn’t know what I was getting in to when I signed up to get an Amazon gift card, and now I’m a published researcher.”
Smith is currently a senior animal sciences student with minors in natural resource management and captive wildlife management, and while her previous research experience is outside of her chosen discipline, it helped prepare her for some of her animal sciences courses and inspired her in her future career path.
“Going into my classes where we read a lot of academic research was easy, because I had already learned how to do it and had a lot of practice,” said Smith. “But participation in this study that involved discussions of minority groups being underrepresented in the field of psychology, making it more difficult for minority students to reach out to mental health professionals, also helped me correlate my thinking to my field, since veterinary medicine is one of the most predominantly white fields out there. Now I have the knowledge to consider how it might have gotten to that point and what it might mean.”
Smith decided she wanted to be a veterinarian when she was 5 years old, and was encouraged by her uncle and aunt, veterinarians in South Carolina with their own practice and graduates of the Tuskegee University College of Veterinary Medicine (one of only two Historically Black Colleges or Universities with a veterinary medicine program). During her time in college, she has only met one other African-American veterinarian.
“I’m very grateful for my uncle and aunt being in that position, because there are so few black veterinarians that having them in my life, accessible, and having their own practice where they are willing to let me shadow them, makes me extremely lucky,” said Smith. “If I hadn’t had them in my life, I wouldn’t have seen myself represented in vet med.”
Smith will be completing a fifth year of school to finish her double minors, and will then pursue admittance to vet school. She is eager to get in and get to work on all kinds of animals, and is very flexible on where her career in veterinary medicine might lead her; she’s just ready to learn.
“My time doing this research outside of animal sciences helped me to keep in my head that as I go into the field of veterinary medicine that while I help every animal, I also want to work to change this lack of representation and inspire the next generation of vets that look like me,” Smith said.