Hi y’all! My name is Stephanie Chen, and I’m a rising senior at Tulane. I’m an English Major, Public Health minor, and pre-med student – and though it sounds like my academic interests are all over the place, I’m really just studying how humans communicate with and help one another. In that vein, my internship this summer is a perfect fit!
I got back from a semester studying abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark a few weeks ago, and this week just started working at GE-National Medical Fellowships. I’m the program intern for the Primary Care Leadership Program, which enables healthcare students to spend the summer working in medically underserved areas across the nation. They pair with health centers in eleven cities, from Mobile AL to Los Angeles CA, and engage in leadership training, independent research, and primary care work. Needless to say, this is the kind of program I’d love to take part if I was a medical student!
As an intern, however, I have a huge variety of responsibilities that primarily lie in the administrative and outreach realm. My responsibilities will vary from week to week, and since the program is currently in session, there are many immediate priorities I’m responsible for. In my first week, I have been researching primary care leaders in the program’s satellite cities to invite to PCLP’s mid-program events (a surprisingly time-consuming task – BUT a fantastic crash-course on primary care politics and implementation in America), developing social media content, and designing graphics. I also got to sit in on a webinar by Paul Schmitz, the author of Everyone Leads: Building Leadership From the Community Up. By the internship’s end, I expect that I’ll have a clear understanding of the primary care landscape nationally, understand the nonprofit sphere, and become even more organized and responsible.
Kaitlin Splett, the Newcomb Scholars program coordinator, helped me find my internship. While studying abroad, it was really difficult to search for internships that would be a good fit for me. Kaitlin helped me find this internship on Idealist, and I can’t be more grateful! Though I’ve only been an intern for a week at GE-NMF, I’ve learned so much. I’ve never worked in the non-profit sector, but this week I’ve seen how resources are prioritized and allocate, how idealism and politics are balanced, and how different, effective models of leadership can be implemented. The office is staffed primarily by women, and though it might not be a consciously “feminist” space, I certainly can see how those ideas I learned about in my junior year Newcomb Scholars seminar “Women Leading Change,” play out in real life.
Fundamentally, I’ve noticed ways in which good people find creative solutions to do good things for other people. I work directly under the senior program manager, Dr. Sybol Anderson, and two women a little older than me, Sam Haun and Jessica Allen. Though they’re my internship “superiors,” they never make me feel that way – I always feel like I’m being taken seriously, and that they really value my contributions. Everyone in the office is incredibly kind and generous, and I already feel at home!