Internship
About Internship
This internship is mainly focused on improving the mental health of residents working in medicine to provide the best care possible for their patients. It aims to reduce burnout, improve coping, and enhance the well-being of medical residents in other aspects of their lives as well.
Project Summary
In my internship, I am actively engaged in supporting resident wellness, with a primary focus on mental health. The overarching goal is to establish a healthy work-life balance for medical residents, addressing the challenges they face in their demanding profession. To combat burnout, we are developing a comprehensive Canvas website that offers a variety of resources tailored to their needs. This initiative is particularly pertinent today, as more than 50% of medical residents report experiencing burnout. In addition to my practical contributions, I am also conducting a literature review to ensure our strategies align with the latest research and best practices in the field. For the literature review, I mainly focussed on the causes of burnout and how it impacts females differently than males.
Workplace
My current strengths as a team member are that I am a hard worker and I try to get things done on time as well as being flexible with what tasks are given to me. One way I want to grow professionally is to break out of my shell more and work with more people and gain more experience in teamwork instead of trying to figure things out on my own. I also want to grow professionally in that I am able to do professional literature reviews as well as maintain discipline even with limited supervision.
Contribution: I have contributed to my internship site by helping with the Canvas page that residents are actually going to use as a resource for help. I have also contributed to my internship site by working on literature reviews and finding articles that are relevant to physician wellness and seeing research behind them to apply it to current residents.
What I learned: Using the RedCap website to complete my literature review during my internship increased my knowledge and comfort level with a variety of research platforms. The guidance provided by my supervisor not only improved my technical skills but also emphasized the significance of effective communication. Observing the diverse team work together to create resident schedules demonstrated the value of different viewpoints when solving problems. The team's success was significantly impacted by the wealth of concepts and methods derived from the varied experiences and backgrounds of its members.
Successes
I experienced a sense of accomplishment when tasked with designing the Canvas page for resident wellness during my internship. Initially, I grappled with challenges such as configuring links and incorporating the correct icons. Overcoming these hurdles marked a significant success in my journey. This showed me that when I am faced with a problem, I try to figure it out on my own first and only get help when I have no other option. It also highlighted to me my problem-solving skills because figuring out how to make a Canvas page wasn't intuitive and I had to figure out how to execute the plan that I had.
Engaging in a comprehensive literature review on physician wellness, particularly focusing on the gender differences between female and male physicians, has been a notable success. Delving into research articles has broadened my understanding of this crucial aspect of healthcare, allowing me to contribute meaningful insights to ongoing discussions on physician well-being. Making a literature review expanded my research skills because I couldn't add just any article that I found about burnout, especially since I wanted it to be more focused on female physicians. And this is not a topic that is written a lot about, so I had to find articles that I thought related to the topic.
Challenges
While navigating my internship, I encountered the challenge of feeling underutilized in the initial stages. The extensive CITI training demanded a considerable amount of time, impacting the volume of work I could take on. However, once I completed the training, I proactively addressed this challenge by seeking more responsibilities. Collaborating with my supervisor, we devised plans for various projects that I could contribute to, presenting a dynamic set of challenges to further enhance my skills. This challenge showed me that I want to get into work right away and that I am not a fan of completing pre-training before it. But, my enthusiasm to start working is what pushes me to finish my training as soon as possible.
Additionally, adapting to a collaborative team environment presented its own set of challenges. Learning how to effectively communicate and collaborate with diverse team members required a nuanced approach. Navigating different work styles, preferences, and expectations has been an ongoing challenge that I am actively working on to foster stronger teamwork. This challenge now highlights my growth in my communication skills because, in the beginning, I'd be too shy to ask for more work or ask certain questions, but now I ask my supervisor any questions that I have without hesitance.
Relation to Career
These successes and challenges have taught me new things about myself. I learned that I tend to be shy in a new environment and have to force myself to get out of my shell. This is important because, with any career that I might have in the future, I will be exposed to new environments and new people, especially in the medical field. As a medical student in the clinical years, I will interact with many different doctors from many different specialties so I have to learn to not be as shy. Even in residency, I will be in a completely new and even stressful environment. I have also learned that I like to work in a team but I have my own independent work that contributes to the team. This is significant because now I know that I like to be independent in my work but not completely alone. Having problem-solving skills from figuring out how to set up the Canvas page and gaining new research skills for my literature review are also critical skills for my career. This is due to the fact that I will most likely have to conduct my own research to apply for medical school in the future.