HARLINGEN — For Sarahi Rodriguez, 17, high achievement is a way of life.
She sets the bar high for herself, and the moment she clears that bar she seeks the next.
And the next.
That’s why Sarahi is an award-winning powerlifter, president of the National Honor Society at Harlingen High School South, a Lady Hawk Basketball Player — and now a certified medical assistant.
She began this most recent challenge at the beginning of the school year, and it wasn’t easy.
“Before I got my certification, I was really overwhelmed with all the work I had to put in to studying,” said the Harlingen South senior.
The coursework she outlined clearly conveys the magnitude of that challenge.
The CMA certification by the National Healthcareer Association required she work through about 20 modules of instruction in such topics as EKG and phlebotomy.
“It was all the basic principles that we have to learn to be a medical assistant,” she said.
She studied each module with a strong sense of purpose, so dedicated to the material that by the day of the test, she felt confident in her ability.
“I just knew I was going to pass it,” she said.
And so she did.
This achievement is impressive in any case, but even more so considering her other endeavors as a student leader and member of the Harlingen South FFA program and the Harlingen school district’s Student Advisory Board.
“At the beginning of the year it started off easy,” she said. “But as time went on with basketball and powerlifting and FFA all in the same season, it just got really more rigorous. I had a lot of late-night studying and early morning wakeups. But at the end it worked out for me.”
So what factored into her decision to earn the certification?
It began with family influences.
“My aunts are in the healthcare profession,” she said. “One of them is a traveling registered nurse and I thought what she did was really interesting.”
This initial spark motivated her in her freshman year to take a course called “Intro to Principles of Healthcare.”
The title doesn’t sound too exciting but with the right teacher it can be a springboard toward further exploration.
“The teacher made all of our learning interesting,” she said. “At the end of the year she recommended me and one of my close friends to volunteer at Valley Baptist.”
It was only a two-week tenure but life changing.
“I helped the nurses with paperwork and vital signs,” she said. “The way they treated people really fascinated me because they handled them with care.”
At the end of those two weeks, she was chosen to observe three surgeries live which piqued her intrigue even further. And the rest is her most recent history, and her histories yet to come.
She leaves her public school career with CMA certification in hand.
She hopes to work in that capacity while earning a bachelor’s of science in registered nursing.
Ultimately, she’d like to specialize in gynecology.
