A lot of our medications come from plants originally, and there are a lot of plants where I live with medicinal value. Willow is probably the best known because aspirin comes from it, and is very common in my area. The main thing will be teaching them which local plants have medicinal use, how to properly identify the plant (I have a dissecting microscope and a few identification books), and how to properly extract the compound that they want.

Steam distillation is a really common method for extracting essential oils, and it's easy to do. Menthol can be extracted from mint this way.

Some of this is what I've learned in uni, but you can get somewhere by looking up the remedy you need in Google scholar with the scientific name of the plant you want to use. USDA plants has really good identification characteristics, so you don't accidentally pick a toxic copy cat.

My advisor got her PhD in England, so I've been trying to get her help in navigating this. I specifically want to do a research PhD, so that narrows my choices a little. Something I don't see mentioned much is networking. I've read a few studies that I can see myself doing, so I'm going to reach out to those researchers because my undergraduate research compliments their research.

There's an exchange program called Erasmus that will provide a monthly living allowance. I saw another one that offered help with employment after completing the degree but I can't find it now. That might have been university-specific.