About Campus
Vital Experience
Dozens of students aiming for careers in medicine are earning clinical hours at Campus Health and Wellbeing.
By Robyn Kontra Tanner // Photos by Joe Johnston
Medical assistant Sarah Knowles (right) takes the blood pressure of a student in the Health Center.
If you are a student with a medical appointment at Campus Health and Wellbeing (CH&W), your fellow Mustangs might be part of your experience.
Groups of specially trained students now work as clinical and medical assistants at CH&W thanks to a Learn by Doing experience that puts them closer to careers in the medical field.
Sarah Knowles (Nutrition ’26) started as a clinical assistant when CHW’s program began in 2023. Before then, she had only shadowed healthcare providers in a few other settings. Cal Poly’s program trained her to become one of the first faces patients could see in the clinic: escorting patients to the right place, collecting vitals like blood pressure, stocking supplies and communicating with the medical care team all while adding clinical hours to her résumé. The environment opened her eyes to a variety of careers beyond becoming a doctor.
“Getting to know the physician assistant providers at the Health Center has helped shape what I want to do,” said Knowles. “So many of our providers are physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Seeing that their responsibilities were not that different from an M.D., I thought, ‘Okay, I can so see myself in this role.’”
CH&W’s clinical assistant program fills a critical niche: Many medical schools, nursing programs and physician assistant programs require applicants to have hundreds of hours of experience working in patient care environments. On the Central Coast, this is one of the few ways students can earn those hours without additional certifications or degrees. Leaders at CH&W developed the program when they saw students having to take a gap year to gain clinical hours to begin the application process. Now, CH&W’s program helps students enter medical programs within months of graduation.
Clinical services director Sondra Williams (left) and Jordan Mickel plan new programs that keep campus healthy.
Knowles expanded her skills when CH&W clinical services director Sondra Williams launched the medical assistant training program in 2025. The experience teaches clinical assistants how to take a step toward direct patient care by discussing health histories with patients, handling electrocardiograms, performing ear lavage procedures, and giving immunizations such as flu shots.
“I learned a lot about how to actually connect with patients and be there for them,” Knowles said. As she concludes her time at Cal Poly she says she has earned more than 1,500 hours of clinical experience to support her applications to physician assistant programs.
Jordan Mickel (Kinesiology ’25) started as a clinical assistant and became the program’s student manager. She has helped CH&W launch the Medical Reserve Corps — which trains student volunteers to provide first aid in medical tents at large campus events — and hosted educational events focused on preventing sexually transmitted infections.
“I think students, at least in my experience, are a lot more open with someone that they don’t think will judge them,” Mickel said of working with patients who are also students. “For the most part, people are very much like, ‘Ah, someone who understands, someone who’s my age, someone who I can connect with.’”
Being a nurse has given me a greater purpose in this life and a greater understanding of what it means to be human — a textbook can never teach that. You must live it through your hands, and this is where that starts.
This fall, Mickel is also helping establish a transportation program that will bring sick and injured students from on-campus locations to the Health Center for non-emergency care. She chose to stay and work at CH&W while she earns a master’s degree in nutrition and completes medical school applications with the goal of becoming a surgeon.
“It’s a good taste of what it’s like to get into a clinic,” Mickel said of the 600 clinical hours she’s logged at the Health Center. “I’ve learned a lot of leadership skills because, in my position now, I’m in charge of helping train and manage 41 of my peers. But I think empathy, compassion, understanding where people are coming from — both as a leader of the student assistants and working with patients — is what I learned.”
“Personally, this is my greatest joy in the work that I do,” said Williams. “Creating a bridge to give others the tools to enter the most profound profession means a little bit of us lives in them forever. Being a nurse has given me a greater purpose in this life and a greater understanding of what it means to be human — a textbook can never teach that. You must live it through your hands, and this is where that starts.”
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