Summer Internship Journals: Thabi Khumalo '17 at MEDscience
As a summer intern at Harvard Medical School’s MEDscience Program, Thabi Khumalo ’17 had the opportunity to preview one of the new experiential learning programs that some of her Rivers classmates will participate in later this year. Thabi spent a week providing support to the team behind MEDscience’s simulation-based bioscience immersion program, helping set up for a variety of daily events for the students, including simulation cases, hospital tours, and skills labs; transcribe students’ reflections; and photograph activities to showcase in a video about the program.
During the academic year, students in Rivers’ Anatomy elective will make weekly visits to the HMS Gilbert Simulation Laboratory where they will have the opportunity to put their classroom lessons about the various human body systems to use and solve authentic medical problems on their simulated patients.
Here is Thabi’s recent journal entry:
Spending a week at Harvard Medical School taught me that healthcare is much more than saving lives. I interned for the MEDscience program out of Harvard Medical School, which is a nonprofit organization geared towards educating high school students with interest in STEM related subjects.
On my first day, I met the simulated patient named STAN, who was a simulator dummy used for various simulations. STAN was managed from a small room adjacent to the main classroom, in which teachers talked into a microphone pretending to be patients of various ages and genders, communicating to the students their pain levels and how they were feeling. Students then had to take an objective assessment of the patient, using the information on a monitor displaying heart rate, oxygen saturation, and other vital signs.
My role in the simulation was to set up STAN for the appropriate simulation and help manage him alongside the teachers. Watching simulations and learning how to effectively and compassionately take care of and diagnose a patient was a meaningful experience. I quickly learned that it is not only important to pay attention to what a patient is saying and feeling, but it is also important to keep a patient calm and make he or she feel as though they are being well taken care of. Trust between a patient and caregiver is the most important part of hospital care, as trust is what allows the patient to be comfortable with the care being given.
Throughout my week at MEDscience, I also got to work with Chinese exchange students taking part in the program. The students ranged from ages fifteen to twenty-two. Something that struck me about the students is their passion for learning. At the end of each day students had to write reflections based on what they learned and experienced during the day. As an intern, the next morning I would transcribe the reflections from the previous day. One boy wrote that “studying makes me happy” and he was not the only student to express such feeling for learning new material. Seeing students so enthusiastic to learn was so inspiring, especially considering so many of them could not speak English very well, and they still took the American material seriously. Working in an environment with such students made the work day not only much more interesting, but it also made my contributions feel much more worthwhile.
Taking part in MEDscience helped me to not only explore my love for science, but it also allowed me to give back to the community in a way I never thought possible. Working with such dedicated teachers and students showed me that though patient care is serious work, it can also be fun. I hope to one day work in a medical setting, and after my experience with MEDscience, I have essential patient and diagnostic skills to take with me.
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