| Jessica Bauer and Rachel Steinman
Interns
in Action, September 2004
Two Sides of an Internship at Bellevue Hospital
Barnard Juniors Jessica Bauer and Rachel Steinman both admit that they had
no idea what to expect when they started internships at Bellevue Hospital's Emergency Medicine Department this past summer. Their 10-week
experience at one of the largest urban hospitals in the U.S., through a program called Project Health care, was in the
end beyond anything they could have imagined. Learning from doctors and
nurses, side by side with medical students, Bauer and Steinman observed
surgeries in the Operating Room, assisted patients with basic needs, and
steadily saw their own attitudes toward both the profession and their
own
futures changing. For Bauer, a neuroscience and behavior major from
Newton, MA., the experience solidified her resolve to pursue a career in
medicine, perhaps even emergency medicine. For Steinman, a biochemistry
major from New Rochelle, N.Y., it was a lesson in human nature and a
deepening understanding of how she might best help people as she decides
upon a career path.
Jessica Bauer
|
In some ways, Bauer's experience is the ultimate internship success
story.
Growing up, she always wanted to be a doctor. She had a strong
interest in science and math and loved to work with people, so the
decision to pursue the medicine was a logical one. She declared herself
pre-med when she entered Barnard and considered the internship, which
she
took with the help of the Marsteller Internship Grant, a great way to
get
her feet wet.
"I wanted to see if I would be able to hack it in the medical world and
there was no other better place to learn," Bauer says. Calling Bellevue
"a
league of its own" due to its inner-city location and the diverse
community it serves, she adds, "If you can make it at Bellevue, you can
make it anywhere."
Bauer said she thrived in the fast pace of the hospital, circulating
through departments in emergency, psychiatric and pediatric services,
doing EKGs to monitor patients' heart rhythms, observing surgeries, and
generally caring for patients' needs. Through it all, her interest in
emergency medicine only grew.
"I was surprised at how much I could take," she says. "We saw some
pretty
gruesome things; we did rotations in the operating room and we got to
look
in on procedures. I was surprised at how interested I was, not how
grossed
out I was."
Rachel Steinman
|
Steinman's experience at Bellevue was similar in many regards, but she
came to it from a slightly different place and drew different
conclusions
about her future. To begin, her aspiration to become a doctor was a
fairly
new one.
"I never thought I'd go to medical school, never thought I'd be a
scientist," Steinman says. But, as the daughter of two scientists, she
discovered an interest in the subject and decided to combine it with her
passion for working with people. "Barnard has a lot of pre-med's, and
when
I got here, I recognized it as a possibility."
Steinman, like Bauer, knew that interning for Bellevue would be a great
way to explore a possible career in medicine. She too threw herself into
it, with the assistance of the Sara Elisabeth Strang '95 Internship Fund,
and
learned immensely from rotating around the different departments,
observing the doctors and nurses in action, and performing non-invasive
procedures like taking EKGs.
She quickly discovered that, more than the medical procedures
themselves,
she was interested in how much the patients benefited from her just
talking to them, listening to their stories or performing small gestures
of kindness toward them. Working for the first time with patients who
sometimes had drug or alcohol or psychiatric problems, she also found
her
attitudes toward different societal problems changing. She started to
pick
up on cues from patients on how much help or care they wanted, and wondered if actually being a doctor would limit the
amount of time she could interact with the patients.
"For the future, I need to decide how to best go about helping other
people," she says.
While Steinman took the MCATs in August, she has not decided
whether or not she will attend medical school. She knows that the
experience at Bellevue will heavily influence her decision, and she adds
that the life lessons she learned there are "more important than any
fact
I could learn in medical school."
Students interested in Project Health Care, which has an application deadline in February, can obtain information in Barnard's Career Services Office.
Click
here to see past Interns
in Action.
If
you would like to be featured as the Barnard Intern in Action
please send an email to Cara Smith, Internship Program Coordinator,
at csmith@barnard.edu.
Indicate where you are interning, what you are doing, and
why you would like to be considered.
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