Are you planning to get a pre-med internship this summer break? Then, you’re not alone! Indeed, you can use the number of weeks you have for the holiday and devote it to several hours in a fruitful pre-med internship experience. With the ample time you have, you can use it to make extraordinary progress in your college years and gain skills in the field.
There are numerous worries when it comes to applying for a pre-med internship. You may want to use it for the best of the best companies, but this would only be possible with proper preparation. This page covers the things you have to get to know before sending out that application to companies.
Get To Know the Common Types of Pre-Med Internship
The common internships you can apply for include roles at public health departments, research projects, companies, nonprofit organizations, and global health projects.
- Research programs – This is where you help further the current research and understanding in a field. Find one that you’re most interested in.
- Public health – The most common internship is working at local, academic hospitals, or country health departments. With the recent events of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals around the world are understaffed and underpaid; having an extra hand like you would benefit hospitals (and your resume).
- Nonprofits – Look at your core values as an aspiring professional in the healthcare field, and look for a nonprofit organization that aligns with this. You can contribute to analyzing experiments to see their effectiveness.
- Companies – Search for a notable company in the private sector. You can apply for several innovative positions.
Try To Look, Speak, and Work Your Best.
Observe a clean appearance when interviewing for the internship and working in the lab. Obviously, one must look and be clean in a lab, but many fail to keep this in mind.
Be sure to also speak eloquently in your internship program to impress future employers if you want to apply to that company after medical school. Also, ensure that you do your tasks the best way you can. You can even double-check to ensure that you did your job right.
Also, when you have a question for your supervisor, be sure to research it by yourself first before asking them immediately, except, of course, if it’s urgent. Sometimes, bosses dislike it when employees have questions that they can find out themselves, so keep an eye on this.
Students are students for a reason. We still have so much to learn on the four walls of the classroom. So, it’s natural to become confused and have numerous questions. As pre-medical students, it’s second nature for us to research a couple of things further; our textbook won’t cover everything we need to learn.
So, just like you’ve done in school, ensure that you research more on the Internet about things that you’re confused about in your internship program before asking your supervisor. You can visit informational websites like the Buzzrx Blog for a couple of easy-to-understand articles that will surely help you in your internship.
Use What You Learned in School!
Students start with a clean slate in universities. In college, we can put everything that we learned on that slate. You can use the lessons you learned in school and apply them in internships.
The things you learn in college prepare soon-to-be professionals for the workforce and medical school. While most or some of what we know in classes is in theory, when you enter companies, you’ll see that you can use your learnings to use.
What Can You Gain From Internships?
The learning and experience you’ll gain from internships would differ based on what company and field you want to get into.
As a psychology major, you may intern in the human resources or a clinical area; both entail that you have to interact with people and gain communication skills. On the other hand, a medical technologist major would learn how to prepare and analyze blood, urine, and different tissue samples.
As you can see, depending on what major you’re in, it would entail different learning experiences. So, to ensure that you indeed learned something in your internship, write down your goals while keeping an eye on medical school. You can even ask yourself the following questions:
- What field of health care do I want to expose myself to?
- Is there an existing project that I want to help make significant progress in?
- What skills do I want to develop or apply?
Final Thoughts
As future professionals, students do everything in their power to show results and to add valuable experiences to their resumes. With billions of students every day, the competition is fierce. As such, many try to intern at notable places.
College students, including pre-med students, tend to become uncertain of their future after four years in university. Thankfully, companies have internship programs that replicate their job experiences in the future. When it’s your time to become a pre-med intern, use this guide to prepare yourself for this journey.
