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Newswise While 12-hour weekend shifts for nurses are typical, its not common to do it while also attending medical school full-time. But thats what Mazvita Ethel Simoyi did during her first year at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, commuting every weekend to a hospital in Washington, D.C. to help pay for her education.

Now set to earn her M.D. degree from UVA this month, Simoyi laughed when asked how she endured the relentless schedule of work, schoolwork and commuting. I honestly do not know how I did it, she said. Necessity makes you rise to the occasion.

Working Toward a Lifelong Dream Simoyi knew she wanted to be a doctor from the time she was 5 or 6, when her father, Dr. Mike Simoyi, a general practitioner in Zimbabwe, brought her to his clinic to observe a tubal ligation. I stood on a stool in the operating room, looking at him make the incision, she said.

As she got older, she helped direct patients at the clinic where her father worked with her mother Regina, a nurse. The time she spent there deepened her commitment to medicine.

The patients [at my parents clinic] are very, very grateful for the help they receive, she said. My father is also very involved in public health, and educating people at a time when HIV and AIDS was beginning to get a lot of attention. Thats why I wanted to be a doctor so I could help people and share my knowledge with them.

To continue her path toward becoming a doctor, Simoyi came to the U.S. from Zimbabwe at age 17 to attend college. After beginning as a biology/pre-med major at Butler University, she transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., earning a nursing degree in 2007. She went into nursing so she could earn a living while taking the remaining pre-requisite classes for medical school and ensure that medicine was 100 percent what I wanted to do.

After three years working as a nurse, she entered UVAs School of Medicine in 2010. But she wasnt quite done with nursing.

Full-Time Medical Student, Part-Time Nurse During her first year as a med student, Simoyi worked weekends on a medical/surgical/oncology inpatient unit at Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C. She would leave Charlottesville around 5 p.m. Thursday or Friday for Washington, staying with her sister Nyasha or friends from Howard University when she wasnt at work. She would return to Charlottesville around midnight Sunday to get some sleep before waking up at 7 a.m. Monday to begin another week of med school classes.

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Mazvita Ethel Simoyi: Nursing Experience Paid Off in Medical School