My Time As a Junior Health Scholar

While I am brainstorming what I can do with the connections in transcription factors that I have found, I want to take some time to talk about what I have been doing at my internship throughout this year. Starting in September I began the COPE Junior Health Scholar program at a local hospital. Last week, I finally completed the program (two days before it was officially discontinued from the hospital I was working at), and I thought I could give some advice to people considering similar programs.

Going into this program, I was expecting to see and interact with doctors. Over the course of the program, however, I saw maybe six doctors in total. And when I did see them, they would go in to see a patient and then disappear. I knew on some level that nurses do most of the work at a hospital, but I did not realize that doctors would be an almost nonexistent presence. Instead, I mainly helped nurses with their daily tasks. Most of the work I did pertained to taking calls from patients and relaying requests back to nurses. I also did a lot of restocking storage equipment and replacing trash. I was always ready to take vitals for a patient, take samples down to the lab, or take a patient down for discharge.

The thing with the later tasks is that I had to take initiative to ask for work to do. The biggest advice about these programs that I have is that the more enthusiastic you are about doing tasks, the more tasks they give you. Obviously, the amount of work to do was tied to how busy the hospital was, but even on relatively empty days there is still a lot to do. The more work that I did without being asked (like restocking the fridge as soon as I arrived), the more tasks I was asked to do.