This past summer I was blessed with the opportunity to work in a travel/tropical medicine clinic. I worked alongside a very insightful team of a Medical Assistant, a Physician Assistant, and multiple Doctors and students throughout the summer. This was my first experience in a clinical setting, and I am very thankful that it was in this environment. Being so interested in global health, getting to hear about diseases and illnesses that are foreign to someone who has lived in the United States their whole life, is a powerful experience. Often, people never know the things that plague those in other countries and learning about these endemic diseases from patients brings a whole new level of understanding that cannot be reached in the classroom.
I worked on multiple projects this summer, including an educational pamphlet for an indigenous tribe in Tanzania, giving them key information about an endemic disease in their local language, Swahili. I also had the opportunity to begin a study on knowledge gaps that exist within our family medicine residents here in Indiana. This study is going to be very influential for the formation of our physicians in Indiana and I am very grateful to be a part of the team who is running it.
Some of my other duties included helping teach veterinary technician students about rabies and the different methods of injection for the vaccine, performing a malaria-blood test for Plasmodium Falciparum and other malaria causing protozoa (as seen in the photo), explaining to patients the best forms of protection against diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and other mosquito transmitted diseases, and helping to translate for patients during pre-hire physicals and drug screenings.
I am very thankful for the opportunity that I was given this summer because it allowed for my desire to become a physician, to become a passion. I learned so much and now have so many more resources and connections compared to before the internship. I would like to especially thank Dr. Guy R. Crowder, Dr. Jeffrey G. Jones, Jill Rogers, Ross Powell, Craig Miller, and Britney Zimmer for making this summer possible!
