For 24-year-old University of Connecticut graduate student Sarah Guggino, her family's long-time struggle with our health care system made her choice of internships an easy one. She picked Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, where she is interning for the fall and spring semesters.

Sarah's family's difficulties with health care have motivated her to help fix the broken health care system.

"It's why I believe in health care for everyone," she said.

When Sarah was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, her father owed a Christian bookstore. Like many small business owners, Sarah's dad paid a lot for health insurance. He was trying to change insurers when Sarah's 2-year-old sister, Rachel, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Rachel spent a year in Children's Hospital in Albuquerque before she was cured. The battle to get the insurance company to pay for that treatment ended only after the aggressive intervention by one of the doctors.

Even after Sarah's sister recovered, the family's struggle to pay for health insurance continued. Rachel's medical history exacerbated the problem.

"Sometimes, we didn't have insurance. If we did, it was horrible - high premiums and high deductibles," she said.

Sarah was more fortunate than her sister. When she was diagnosed with early-stage skin cancer, she had health care coverage through UConn. And, also fortunately, 20 years after being diagnosed, her sister remains in remission.

Still, when she enrolled in the University of New Mexico as an undergraduate, she only had a vague notion of what she wanted to do - make money, be successful, perhaps go to law school.

Then, at the end of her senior end, she went to Africa. For this Midwesterner of Italian-Spanish heritage, the experience caused a transformation.

"My outlook on life totally changed. I fell in love with the people and the culture."

Her interest in Africa began with an African politics class she took as a senior at the University of New Mexico. In 2006, Shiame Okunor, the head of the African American Studies Department, recruited Sarah and several other students to come with him to Ghana to continue work on public library he had begun in the capital city of Accra.

Professor Okunor had donated his family home for the library building in Adabraka, his old neighborhood. The group brought books to stock the library. Students also toured the country, getting a good dose of a culture Sarah had never experienced.

"In Africa, I viewed things differently. I realized that things in life aren't always absolute," she said. She went home determined to devote her life to helping the African people.

The sense of purpose that African trip stirred led Sarah to reconsider her vague career goals. She had participated in the American Civic Literary Study, run through UConn's Intercollegiate Study Institute.

Eventually, UConn recruited her to be a regional research manager in the Western United States. She met with students who were taking the same study she took. Through that job, she met Christopher Barnes, who was then director of the UConn study. Professor Barnes urged her to pursue her passion for Africa by studying for a master's degree from UConn's Department of Public Policy. She enrolled in 2007.

Sarah's graduate thesis for her Masters in Public Administration will explore whether Ghanaian market vendors would be willing to pay into a non-profit fund that would be used to promote economic growth. She plans to spend the winter break in Ghana talking to local merchants and villagers, and doing research.

Sarah is also aware of the power of politics in pursuing her goal of improving life in Africa. This past summer, she went to Washington, D.C. to work for U.S. Rep. John Larson and the House Democratic Caucus.

She hopes to combine all her training and experiences in a career that matches her love of Africa with her interest in politics - ideally working for an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization).

Wherever her passion leads her, Sarah is determined to improve the lives of the people she has met in Africa and the ones she hasn't met. That library was just the beginning.