Inspiring Journey from Refugee to Marine to Graduate

CSUSM NewsCenter

Nearly a decade as a refugee after fleeing a brutal civil war? Check. U.S. Marine combat engineer in Iraq and Afghanistan? Check. Promising biochemist who has been accepted into among the most prestigious research institutions in the world? Check.Meet Sharon Patray, who will walk across a stage at Cal State San Marcos on May 20 to receive her Bachelor of Science Degree in Biochemistry before setting off for a Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore this fall.

“A day doesn’t go by where I don’t look back at my experiences and think about how fortunate I am,” Patray said. “Even when I’m pumping gas into my car at the gas station, I think, if you would have told me when I was a kid that I would even have my own car, I wouldn’t believe it. Where I came from, only rich people had cars.”

How did she do it?

“Determination, hard work and luck,” Patray said.

Patray’s mentor, Associate Professor of Biochemistry Dr. Sajith Jayasinghe, is among her biggest fans.

“She is a role model for my other students in the lab,” Jayasinghe said. “They see what she has done, where she has come from, and where she is going to.”

Born in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, Patray fled with her mom and most of her family to Ghana during the first Liberian Civil War, a conflict that left more than 600,000 people dead from 1989 to 1997. She was 6 years old when she left her homeland, and she would spend much of the next nine years in a refugee camp.

At the age of 15, Patray landed in Rochester, N.Y., to live with her father. Although she earned a fully paid scholarship to study engineering at Clarkson University, a private research institution near the Canadian border, Patray could not capitalize on ...

Read More