This summer, I worked at the Will-Grundy Medical clinic in Joliet, IL and participating in parasitology research in Dr. Wetzel’s lab.
During my time at the Will-Grundy Medical clinic I aided the physicians in scribing during patient interactions. I learned about writing up a proper SOAP note and how to navigate their preferred clinical software, Athena. The clinic relies solely on the volunteering of mostly retired physicians who all have very insightful knowledge on anything medicine and are easy to talk to. Working at this clinic has taught me how important it is to consider language barriers in medicine and how to work around that especially when you are serving a lot of patients who are mainly Spanish speaking like in Joliet. This internship has also solidified my interest in the medical field and has helped me understand the importance of physician and patient interactions. Id highly recommend this internship to any aspiring premed students especially those who are Spanish or would like to improve on their Spanish speaking skills. I’d like to thank the Will-Grundy medical clinic’s staff for the opportunity and to the volunteering physicians for their insightful knowledge.
For the last half of the summer, I worked with Dr. Wetzel in his parasitology lab. We were responsible for going out to the bio department’s pond and catching potential parasite hosts and would examine them back in the lab for parasitic infections. We came across a lot of different parasitic infections and had a lot of freedom on what kind of research we wanted to do on any particular parasite. Dr. Wetzel helped to aid our research efforts by providing potentially valuable research articles, necessary equipment we would need, or by providing his general parasitology expertise to answer any questions we may have. I particularly focused on researching a parasite that has a Virgulate cercarial phase that secretes a mucoid thread to aid in host infections. Apart from our own personal research, Dr. Wetzel also taught us how to properly catch and dissect frogs, and other hosts, for parasites and always had something new to teach whenever we came across something in the pond. This internship taught me the obstacles that are often faced in a research lab that come with “exploring unexplored territory” and that it often takes time to formulate questions and experiments to further your research. I’d recommend this internship to any bio majors looking to get some research experience, especially bio majors who are more interested in the ecological side of biology. I’d like to thank Dr. Wetzel for this opportunity and being such a great mentor this summer.
