Next week, Sanaa Simmons is off to study medicine at her dream school, the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

She graduated from Warwick Academy – where she was head girl – in May after achieving an International Baccalaureate exam score of 42 points, one of the highest results in Bermuda this year. The IB is scored out of 45 with the global average being 30.3.

The last two years have been full of hard work and sacrifice for the 18-year-old.

In 2023, she played football for Bermuda’s Under-20 team, but this year had to focus on her studies.

“I did not remove myself from it completely, but I had to hold back a bit to focus on my last year of high school,” she said.

Last year, she went with her family to visit an aunt in Bangkok, Thailand. While everyone else saw the sights, Sanaa spent most of her time in a café cramming for the University Clinical Aptitude Test required to get into medical school in Britain.

“It was a crazy summer,” she said. “I was really focused, because I knew I could only take this exam once a year.”

However, she confessed that she enjoys studying and secretly loves the challenge of taking examinations.

She had to fly to the UK to take the UCAT in the middle of studying for mock IBs at Warwick Academy. She could have asked to be excused from the mocks, but did not.

The UCAT is extremely rigorous.

“It is more of an IQ test,” she explained. She scored in the 75th percentile.

Going into medicine is a relatively new goal for her. In her earlier years at Warwick Academy she thought she would go into international business.

“That changed when I got my GCSE results,” she said. “Before that I always underestimated my academic potential.”

When she received 10 A* in 2022 for her GCSEs she realised she was capable of taking on a more challenging academic journey.

“It really boosted my confidence,” she said.

In middle school, Sanaa enjoyed distributing meals in a church feeding programme.

“I learnt how to interact with people who were not necessarily my age or in my social group,” she said.

In choosing a career she wanted to combine that with her love of science, which she credits to her mother Alnisha Simmons, a science lecturer at the Bermuda College.

“I wanted to be smart about going into a field with job security that allowed me to engage with science and people,” she said. “Medicine beautifully encompasses all of those aspects. There are many avenues in healthcare, but medicine stood out because of the continuity of care you have with patients. There are also more opportunities to specialise.”

A year ago she spent several days shadowing obstetrician and gynaecologist Carla Ming Reese.

“I was able to watch how she interacted with patients,” Sanaa said. “It was interesting because obstetrics can be considered primary care, but she also has links into the hospital.”

Several patients gave permission for Sanaa to witness their examinations. Her mother worried that this might turn her off from medicine, but instead it only encouraged her further.

“The job shadowing made me really want to become a doctor,” she said.

However, she is not yet sure what type of medicine she wants to go into.

“It is easy to fixate on a speciality and then have a whole different experience when you are in medical school,” she said. “The reality is I have only seen one type of medicine, so far.”

She is keeping her mind open, for now.

“I would like to return to Bermuda, so I probably will not be doing anything too niche for the island,” she said. “I want to specialise in something that I can do here.”

The college application process had its challenges.

As Sanaa is Bermudian she applied as a home student, meaning she would pay the lower tuition rates like people living in the UK. To hedge her bets she also applied to medical schools in Cyprus and Malta, which were slightly easier to get into.

She almost did not get into the University of Liverpool when they accidentally put her in the international student category.

Sanaa said: “They only admit a really small number of international students to the programme, so I was initially rejected.”

When she and her family realised she had been wrongly classified, her parents objected. The school allowed her to take the admissions interview online, and she was eventually accepted.

“We were overjoyed,” her mother said.

Medicine is the most competitive programme in Britain. Out of 24,000 applications received each year, only 30 per cent are accepted. To make things even more challenging students can only apply to four medical schools at a time, plus one programme that is not medicine. If students do not get in to medical school the first time, they have to wait a year before reapplying and take the UCAT again.

Her hope is to eventually come back to Bermuda to practice medicine.

“The UK has the National Health Service, which offers free public healthcare,” she said. “In Bermuda it is privatised, so it will be interesting having my residency completed in the UK and then coming back to Bermuda to different perspectives. It will be an interesting journey and experience and I am really excited.”

Her advice to other young Bermudians coming behind her, who also want to get into medicine, is work hard.

She said it is easy to feel alone while going through the application process, especially when there is no one else in your class who wants to do the same thing.

“There are people all around the world that want to do it,” she said. “You can find your community in other ways, such as through social media.”