Junior Health Scholar Shruthi Venkat is serving one of the hospital patients lunch when, suddenly, she sees a stampede of doctors racing towards one of the rooms. Venkat doesn’t know what happened, but she knows it can’t be good. The scene is hectic: the doctors speak to each other quickly and they act quickly because they know the next few minutes are crucial to saving that patient’s life. As an intern, Venkat can only watch and hope that the doctors ensure the patient’s safety.
Close-up experiences like this are what makes internships so useful; they give people a better understanding and appreciation of the job they want to pursue. For Venkat, this has taken form as a yearlong internship at Swedish Hospital.
“When I was doing research, I was looking for which ones get me the most hands-on experience,” Venkat said.
“I’m really interested in medicine, but I’m not sure what I want to do,” Venkat said. “I thought taking an internship might be able to see what pathways are open to me.”
The internship, known as the COPE Health Scholars Internship, allows Venkat to have firsthand experience in the hospital, mainly through being a nursing assistant.
“You sign up for these two-hour shifts, and you get assigned to different departments of the hospital,” Venkat said.
Rather than immediately being thrown into a code red, being a nursing assistant allows Venkat to gradually adjust to this environment by providing daily care for her patients.
“You answer a patient’s call lights and find out what they need, and then tell the nurse,” Venkat said. “We usually clean up after them and provide food for them.”
It hasn’t all been serene, tranquil tasks for Venkat, however. Sometimes, emergencies happen, and they act as a way for her to peer into what life as a nurse would be like.
“Emergencies are just an everyday thing for them, and it made me realize that if I wanted to be a nurse or doctor, that would be something I’d have to adapt to,” Venkat said.
Despite all of the chaos, Venkat believes the internship is just what the doctor ordered.
“You’re in the offices where they work, you’re taking things to the soil utility room, you’re taking vitals,” Venkat said. “You’re doing all these jobs that most interns or volunteers don’t get to do.”
With the time she has left in the internship, Venkat has one main goal: to put the skills she has learned into practice.
“You can shadow nurses while they’re doing certain procedures and ask them to do something when your patient needs it, and that would be such a cool opportunity,” Venkat said.
Like any good internship, COPE has shown Venkat an in-depth look at what her job would be like if she chose this pathway.
However, it has also given Venkat some important insight.
“It lowkey made me reject the idea of nursing. Now I’m more interested in a more hands-on surgeon position or even a research part.”
