Class of 2013: Freshman Blog

Two summers ago at this time, I was waking up early every morning, putting on my worker boots, and heading over to the site where I helped the construction crew haul bundles of cedar shingles to be assembled into a roof.  Last summer at this time, I was waking up at around 6 AM, putting on my baseball cap with a smiling pretzel on it, and going to the factory to mix dough and twist the dough into soft pretzels.  This summer, however, I wear actual work clothes to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer.  For me this job is weirdly, well, normal.

While I could have spent the summer researching back in Baltimore, working in a hospital was much more likely to help me answer the question of whether or not I want to go to med school in three years, so in the end I obviously opted to volunteer.  I was assigned to a unit with both neurosurgery and neurology patients, and that was pretty much all I knew about my unit before showing up on the first day.  As it turns out, it’s a lot more demanding and a lot more intense than I thought it was going to be.

For confidentiality reasons I can’t talk much about working at the hospital, but there have definitely been a few key things I’ve learned so far through this whole experience:

1.  Get to work on time!  Even though I’m a volunteer, if I didn’t show up for whatever reason, everyone would have to make adjustments in their already busy schedules.  Even if the train breaks down and leaves me stranded at some random station in north Philly (which has happened three times so far), I’ve somehow managed to make it there.

2.  All of the hospital staff really value education.  I frequently meet complete strangers throughout the hospital who are willing to bend over backwards to show me where something is or how to do a certain task correctly.  When people sacrifice their time like this so that my job is a little easier to figure out, I feel very obligated to do things right and to take some pride in my work.

3.  Treat everyone extremely well.  Even though the hospital is an enormous place, I see the same people over and over again every week, whether they’re nursing assistants on my unit, transporters, environmental staff, or anyone for that matter.  Even if you think you’ll never see someone again, it’s important to be friendly: you never know when you could be needing that person’s help.

4.   Don’t underestimate anyone’s job.  I’ve never seen a group of people work as hard as the people I see everyday at the hospital.  Everyone has an important job, and everyone is extremely busy.

5.  Learn about what and whom you’re dealing with.  If you’re working on the unit, most of the patients expect you to have some idea about how their conditions are affecting them.  Also, if they speak a language other than English, they expect you to be able to speak to them enough to figure out what their basic needs are.  Life becomes a lot easier for both you and the patient if you learn at least a few phrases of their language.

Even though I had some exposure to the medical field before this whole experience, I would definitely consider this a crucial experience to have before applying to medical school.  If I make it through thirteen weeks of working extremely hard on the nursing unit without pay and I still want to work in a hospital, then I feel like I have a good reason to stay on the pre-med track.