Boston Medical Center, Women In Control, Boston, MA
As a pre-medical student at Williams College, I have always wanted to get the chance to work inside the walls of a hospital. For my first summer as a college student I worked outside the walls as an EMT. For my second summer, I worked in an orthopedic research lab that was based outside the hospital. This summer was my final chance to get inside a hospital for an internship. For these three months, I wanted to do something different and work on a cause that taught me something that I haven’t been previously exposed to. I was looking for a change of pace in my internship experiences as well as looking for an internship that taught me how to look at situations differently. Now looking back, I had high standards and a lot of motivation to find the right fit for me. I didn’t know where I should look for the summer that I wanted, but I knew that I wanted to look until I found it.
It took a few days for me to realize that something I hadn’t really experienced in the medical world was public health. My passion for the subject emerged from the first public health class I took on qualitative research at Williams in the fall of my junior year. I remember enjoying the final project and the attention to detail and social cues that a public health researcher must obtain before he or she can go out in the field and practice. It was the kind of experience I could imagine myself doing for a summer, and it was something I would be interested in exploring in the future.
Acting on my instinct, I did some research and found an interesting public health study at Boston Medical Center entitled Women In Control. Just from the sound of the name, I knew I was going to enjoy the objective of the project. I was caught by the description of the project from the beginning. Women In Control is a research study whose purpose is to help diabetic African American women get back in control of their lives. This meant that participants would come into the hospital for eight weekly session to learn how to take care of themselves mentally and physically. This seemed like an empowering and good cause to get involved with as well as a valuable learning experience.
When I got to the offices in May, the internship had more layers of complexity than I had initially imagined. The team was not only made up of hardworking, caring, thoughtful, and insightful women who were strong leaders in focus groups and in the office, but they were also open to having difficult discussions that would often brush on race, power dynamics, and class. It was a joy to be surrounded by these women for three months because they really cared about my improvements and understanding while I was interning there. Their goals were very much focused on the participants outcomes, and genuinely cared about their success in the study, which was a refreshing take considering how often health research can lead to careless decision making about the good of the participants.
While I was at the office, I would input information that was filled out by the head clinical on the team as well as forms filled out by participants on a computer data program called RedCap. Getting to learn how to navigate RedCap as well as the hospital database called EPIC was a great learning experience because I know I will need to learn how to use this resource in my practice in the future. Every week I was in charge of calling participants, creating slideshows for the content we were presenting at the sessions, and helping out the recruitment team with creating newsletters to send out to participants. The work that I was doing was fulfilling and kept me busy. I would often find myself working on an assignment with other interns my age from Boston University who would also be majoring in a science, so we would bond about our experiences and even make time outside of work to explore the city. The work culture at Women In Control was one made for cooperative work and increased the general commitment of the researchers to the study, as well as the participants. It was refreshing to witness the team having difficult discussions about the participant sessions because often it would bring up researcher’s own insecurities and faults, and despite having to acknowledge they made a mistake they conversed honestly and wore their hearts on their sleeves. It was also interesting to talk to my fellow coworkers about their individual paths to Women In Control. I had found out that one of my coworkers worked at the World Health Organization before she joined the team, so I got to ask her questions that I wouldn’t have been able to find the answers to without knowing someone who has worked there. Another coworker is also going to apply to medical school, so we discussed how she thinks this internship has prepared her for the medical field.
By the end of my three months at Women In Control, I got to see the ins and outs of recruiting participants to enroll in our study, and how these women feel about the work that we’re doing. It was interesting to learn about their personal struggles that has brought them to their diabetes diagnoses and I have grown a deeper understanding of how the disease can be caused by a multitude of causes rather than the stereotypical reason that they had too much sugar in their diet. In general, the reason that many women develop diabetes is not solely based on diet, but rather these women are coming from low-income households and are often raising their children by themselves. It is difficult for them to balance eating vegetables and healthy produce when they have to commit money to their rent and other bills. Healthy food is not their priority, and neither is working out. They do what they can to survive because scarcity is a serious concern in their lives. These issues were just some of the things that I realized while working in the office and conversing with the staff. This is something I will take from my internship experience and something that I hope to apply to my medical practice in the future.
I would like to take another public health class at Williams, but this time focused on food inequality and nutrition considering how important food is in our lives and paying for it can become a social barrier. I did enjoy taking the introduction to qualitative public health class at Williams last year, but I would like to apply the knowledge I learned this summer to my academic course selection to try to, if not find a solution, better my understanding of the issue.
While at Williams, I expect that my internship will be useful to me because I can bring up valuable points when it comes to intersectionality and power dynamics in research studies. These were very relevant topics in the study this summer, and were touched on heavily because race and power were very important aspects behind the way the research study was conducted. These are such important topics because if I were to design a research study focusing on African-American women, I would want to hire staff of color in order to make the participants as comfortable as possible during the sessions. Again, these were issues I learned from this internship and wouldn’t have been able to learn it outside of it, so I am thankful for this opportunity to learn something I haven’t been exposed to before. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my alumni sponsors, the Class of 1972, and the ’68 Center for Career Exploration.