What do pre-med interns do?

[dancinonwater]

Has anyone interned in a hospital as a pre-med student? What kinds of things did you do, and what did you learn? How did you get the opportunity to be an intern? Were you allowed to interact with patients, and to what extent?

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[masaraksh]

You can volunteer. That will generally be one of the following three things:
- clerical, paperwork
- labwork, cleanup, tech
- wheeling around old people, feeding them, bringing thing X to place Y

You can also shadow doctors. Much more interesting IMO.


Either way, do sometime. If you've never spent much time in a hospital/clinic you're gonna have a tough time convincing admissions committees that you want to be a doctor (unless you're some kind of superstar applicant in other areas).

 

[ZeaL6]

I obtained a cardiac rehabilitation internship as my "capstone" to my exercise science degree. I was able to do everything they do. Monitor exercise, EKG's, write exercise prescriptions, go into phase 1 in the hospital and walk the patients that have just undergone open heart surgery, take blood pressures, you name it. I also had a few perks where I was able to view surgeries, echos, stress tests, heart caths, etc. It was a really good experience to have but I know many students have trouble obtaining these because of liability insurance. Since it was a mandatory part of my program, the school covered me.

 

[kyamh]

It's nice to be excited about the future...but you will have so many more opportunities to actually do things as a med student/resident/physician that I wouldn't work too hard to get "hands on" experience in medicine as a pre-med. Shadowing and volunteering is all you really need. If you have the chance and time, sure, go for it, it sounds fun. That said, I would take the opportunity to be a college kid and have a bit of fun once your pre-med responsibilities are taken care of.

 

[Escape_Goat]

Get coffee. Pick up dry cleaning. Wax car.

 

[neekzg]

There's a lot of student-run volunteering programs that classify themselves as "internships". In my experience, they're all just different aspects of volunteering but they like to put the title "internship" on it if they are somewhat selective in admitting students or have some specific skills they'd like to teach you. Some may be emergency care related, or identifying patients that have possibly have had a stroke, physician shadowing programs, and some may have you take on a role to talk to patients and assess the quality/responsiveness of their care. It really depends on the program, and this can really vary depending on the hospitals around you and what your school offers in conjunction with the nearby hospitals.

 

[Mt Kilimanjaro]

Has anyone interned in a hospital as a pre-med student? What kinds of things did you do, and what did you learn? How did you get the opportunity to be an intern? Were you allowed to interact with patients, and to what extent?

I thought of this article when I read the title. I'll post it anyway.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/09/modern-medicine-intern-day.html

 

[Pacna]

Become an ER scribe. It's a great learning experience and you get to do stuff if you get a shweet doc.