Nursing home. Food bank. Hospice. Hospital. School of Public Health student Ashley Bobman volunteers at all of these places for up to 12 hours a week while maintaining a 3.96 grade point average. She also finds time to write and translate a dying Sephardic language.

A junior majoring in public health and minoring in nutrition, Bobman was selected to receive the University of Washington Sophomore President’s Medal for maintaining the highest academic standing of her class. The award recognizes her interdisciplinary work and the breadth and depth of her extracurricular activities.

“I feel very honored,” Bobman said. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

The Mercer Island native chose to study public health to prepare for a career as a nurse practitioner.

“My grandmother was a pancreatic cancer survivor,” Bobman said. “She had an amazing medical team and a favorite nurse, Nancy.”

Bobman says public health helps her “look at patients as a whole instead of just their particular diseases.”

A lover of math and science, she is also pursuing a minor in Nutritional Sciences.

“I look forward to working with patients to exercise more and eat better,” she said.

Bobman’s older brother and sister volunteer, and her parents have always stressed giving back to the community.

At Seattle’s Kline Galland home and hospice, Bobman reads to and listens to the stories of residents. She has also volunteered at Swedish and Harborview Medical Centers. Several of those patients have died, a painful experience she says will help prepare her for a career in nursing.

Bobman is also immersed in her Jewish heritage and the UW’s Sephardic Studies Program. Her great-grandfather, Albert Levy, was a prominent and prolific writer in Ladino, the dying language of the Sephardic people.

“Most people who speak and write it are in their 80s and 90s,” said Bobman, who is working on translating more than 400 pages of her great-grandfather’s texts. She’s now writing her own original works in Ladino.

In her spare time, Bobman likes to get together with friends and sing, or stay in shape with a good cardio workout. She’s also a member of the informal Poetry Brigade.

“We get together and share poems we have read, write poems, and do things like poem drops and on-the-spot poem writing for others around campus,” Bobman said.

How does she balance all of these activities with her challenging coursework in the Interdisciplinary Honors program?

“It’s a matter of balance and not procrastinating,” Bobman says. “I get started on projects three weeks before they’re due.”

Reprinted by permission of the University of Washington School of Public Health