present perfect or past simple?

I came, I saw, I blinded 'em with science

...that made me laugh :-)

Enough of this horse manure.
As a Z… carries its coded meaning of in the capacity of Z.... It takes effort to coerce any other meanings. End of story.

As a student, she studied psychology, and as a desperate spinster she has chased every male academician on campus.

What capacity is a teenager, a child?

tak jak mg to uwypukla, 'as' sprowadza sie do czasownika 'be', a wyrazanie czyjegos 'capacity' jest jego pochodna, ktore nie moze byc wg twego 'end of story'

NO.
You can derive your interpretations as long as you like (farting around the corners in the general direction of the question) to hide the obvious: there is no finite verb in as (a) teacher, as (a) student, as (a) priest. as (a) governor...
There is nothing finite in the verbing of "being a student, priest, governor ..." either.

When is a special word. It seems to sort out things not only in the temporal domain, but also in other logical realms. Don't shove it where it does not belong.

How could I, Janski?

As as a preposition. The preposition as has two main uses:
...
a) expressing comparison
...
b) expressing the meaning of the verb 'be'
Taken from Longman Grammar

Still flogging a dead horse, huh?
OK, once again: you need to take the context into account (I know it's your favorite word yet you don't seem to fully understand it or at least recognize it when you see one). The context is that the person was a student in the past. Thus:

As a student, she studied psychology. = When she was a student, she studied psychology.

That's why the second one is a perfectly acceptable paraphrase of the first one. Mind you: p a r a p h r a s e. We're not talking perfect equivalency, which is very rare if not impossible.