Deciding on a college major can be tough, especially one in medicine.
Outside the classroom, students are required to obtain hundreds of clinical hours. Dr. Daniel Clark, a surgeon for Excela Health, said the trouble is that there aren't many opportunities for students to get them all without straying far from home, so he decided to create one.
“There's nothing in the region that offers a program like this, so anybody from Westmoreland County would have to leave the county to go have this type of program to get the hours they need,” Clark said.
On Friday, four interns from around Westmoreland County completed eight weeks of a new, “PreHealth” summer internship — nabbing 320 clinical hours in the process. Three previously interned with Excela as high school students and were tapped to return for this year's pilot program.
Each intern received a $2,000 stipend, a plus, Clark said, considering that many universities and employers look more favorably on paid experience.
The “PreHealth” moniker alludes to the array of shadowing opportunities Clark tried to present to students each week as they rotated between different centers in the network.
Pitt sophomore Zoey Reyes of Latrobe, for example, said she was interested in speech pathology, and that she spent the last week of her internship shadowing speech pathologists.
Ajay Padmanahba, a Penn State sophomore from Latrobe, said he is more interested in neuroscience.
Courtney Clark, Dr. Clark's daughter, said she is more interested in specialty surgery and spent part of her internship shadowing surgeons in the operating room.
“There's a lot of pressure to do something in the summer, but it was nice to be home, too,” the Harvard freshman said. “I get to hang out with my family while also doing a serious internship.”
Reyes agreed.
“This was good for me because I feel like I can say, at the end of this, I have a solid idea of where I want to go from here,” she said.
As students mull over a career in medicine, Dr. Clark said it's important that they see what the day-to-day responsibilities are for different people in the field — especially, he said, considering the exaggerated portrayals of medicine in film and television.
“Part of the whole idea behind this is to help them make a decision, even if that decision is ‘medicine is not for me,' ” he said.
Michael Jacobyanski, a recent Pitt graduate from Connellsville, will soon decide whether he wants to go to medical school and — if so — to study what.
“I came into this, I didn't really know much about medicine. I didn't really know what I wanted to do,” he said. “The goal of this for me was to get a general overview of bunch of different specialties.”
Matthew Guerry is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-850-2122, mguerry@tribweb.com, or via Twitter at @MattGuerry.
