When to Look for Summer Opportunities
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A lot of deadlines will be in November through February, but the process begins with self-reflection.
The Center for Career Development provides a step-by-step guide for your internship search, and it begins with spending some time just thinking: about yourself, your interests, and your goals.
Specifically, as a prehealth student, consider what you want to gain from your summer:
- Do you seek hands-on patient care experience to be sure medicine is for you (or to build evidence for med schools that it’s for you)? It can be challenging to make time and find patient care exposure during the academic year.
- Do you want to do research, to see if you want to pursue it long-term, or might prefer a research career to a medical one?
- Do you want to address a social issue you’re passionate about?
- Do you want to be near home, or maybe see a completely new place?
- Do you want to experiment with another field as you decide between health and another interest?
Remember that you can always build in some health-related activity in your spare time outside of your primary summer endeavor (e.g., if you’re working in consulting 50-60 hours per week, you can volunteer at a hospital or clinic for a couple of shifts in the evenings or weekends). Once you’ve thought more about what you might want, start doing some online searching, cast your net widely, use the HPA summer opportunities webpages, and keep good notes on deadlines and requirements so that you’ll be able to create an action plan on what applications to do when.
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In addition to external organizations that sponsor their own internships, Princeton departments and programs coordinate many programs specifically for our students. We’ll share any internships that we come across that seem relevant—both Princeton-sponsored and external—in Vitals.
The Center for Career Development has a list of Princeton internship programs. Scanning the list, we’ve known prehealth students who participated in most of them, and the ones who are happiest with their experiences let their interests drive their internship search.
Since many aspiring doctors are driven by their love of science, we see a lot of participation in research programs like OURSIP and ReMatch+. Others enjoy science, but are more motivated by their desire to serve patients, and they may focus on the civic engagement opportunities like Service Focus and Princeton Internships in Civic Service. Some prehealth students are driven to improve healthcare access and equity for populations of color, and they may be drawn to the newer Recognizing Inequities and Standing for Equality (RISE) fellowships. Some want to head back to their local community to make a difference in the healthcare system, and they can design their own projects and apply for funding through programs like the Bogle Fellowship.
Before you jump into reading up on all of the programs out there, which can be overwhelming, start with some self-reflection on your interests, values, and goals for the summer (see Career Development’s FAQ for some good reflection questions).
To get some inspiration directly from past students’ internship experiences (and some free snacks), stop by Frist MPR this afternoon for the Service and Social Impact Internship Showcase. There will be many more events to come that’ll help familiarize you with internships, and we’ll advertise those in Vitals, as well!
What to Do During the Summer
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While your high school volunteer experience may have been helpful in your decision to pursue the prehealth path, it will be important to continue to develop clinical exposure (especially time in direct service to patients) to enhance your own understanding of what it means to practice medicine and to convey to medicals school that you have deepened your engagement throughout your college years. You may choose to gain more clinical exposure in the summer, but you may prefer to do this during the academic year, and do something entirely different during the summer.
Doing benchwork in a lab prior to medical school is certainly not essential (unless you are pursuing an MD/PhD). If you are passionate about lab work and want to pursue it, that’s fine. But don’t spend your summer in lab just because you think you “should.”
There’s no one way to answer the question of what you “should” do this summer. Instead, think about what you want to gain from your summer:
- Are there skills that you'd like to develop?
- Are there competencies (e.g., teamwork, cultural competency, service orientation), that you want to develop or demonstrate?
- Is there a social issue that you're passionate about that you could address?
- Is there a work setting you'd like to explore?
When you apply to medical school, admissions committees will look at what you've done and they'll be interested in why you've done them. You don't want your only rationale for doing things to be "because I thought admissions committees would want me to do it" (it's true that admissions committees want you to gain experience with patients, but hopefully you also want to spend time with them now, since you hope to spend the rest of your life with them as a physician!). Even if you don't land the "perfect" internship, whatever you end up doing, reflect on what you're learning, how you're contributing, and where you might go and what you might do as the next step. Developing your narrative over time is an important part of your prehealth preparation.
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Go ahead and work at the summer camp. It’s nice to love kids! Medical schools think so, too. Maybe you could hang out with the camp nurse a bit? You could also work at a summer camp specifically for kids with medical needs to gain experience with this population. Some prehealth students do their medically-related activities during the academic year instead of the summers. Do what works best for you.
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Why not do both? The Princeton summer is a luxurious twelve weeks, which means that you have more time than many of your peers at other schools to engage in numerous activities. Many internships last eight to ten weeks, which would still leave time to do some full-time shadowing. It may be worthwhile to let your internship supervisor know that you’re considering a medical career and see if they have any contacts who you could shadow or know of nearby places where you could volunteer. Once you know your internship site, you can also start googling for nearby hospitals and see if you can do a weekend volunteer shift, an evening EMT training class, spend time at an animal shelter, or take part in a similar endeavor that doesn’t take up too much time. Remember, internships are usually about forty hours a week, so that leaves 128 hours of time – even after adding in commuting, meals, sleep, and socializing, you should be able to spare a few hours to gain some medically relevant experience.
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This will depend on what you've already done, if anything, in healthcare, but most likely three things:
- Clinical experience that helps ground your interest in real-life exposure to patients and healthcare settings. This could be part-time through volunteering and shadowing, full-time as a clinical research intern (specifically in a position with a lot of interaction with patients), seeking training as an EMT or CNA to gain tangible skills, or some other mechanism.
- Reflection: how you'll tell the story of your growing interest in medicine and your motivation for it. Start to connect the dots between past experiences and your future in medicine.
- Getting up to speed on the logistics of medical school application: what classes do you need, what does the application timeline look like, what timeline makes the most sense for you. You can glean some of this from our HPA website, but it's sometimes more efficient to talk to other premeds who are further along in the process. If you're a science major, you probably know some from classes, but we can also help connect you with some who have similar interests (including our HPA Peer Advisers).
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Start with your campus network: Did you take a class that inspired you? Maybe your prof or preceptor has a project you can contribute to virtually from home. You might also check with study abroad, career development, and other offices to see what opportunities still exist. We have a few left on our summer spreadsheet!
Branch out more widely in the Princeton network: Search for alums in your area on LinkedIn, TigerNet, and other tools. If there’s no one local, set up some informational interviews to learn more from alums who share your interests.
You already have a network of people who know you and your abilities at home, so that can be a great resource. Maybe there’s a service activity you can return to, or even ramp up your responsibility within. You have wisdom to share with younger students at home – are there mentorship opportunities you could pursue?
If you need to make money to help with your finances this summer, think about what jobs can help you show or work on some of the premed competencies or familiarize yourself with clinical spaces. Find a job that helps you build teamwork and communication skills; volunteer at a free clinic and do some shadowing on the side; read some medical memoirs. Read our Summer Spotlights for more inspiration from alums.
Where to Look for Summer Opportunities
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Any internships we hear about are posted in our Vitals newsletter. Be sure to subscribe if you aren't receiving it every Friday! Our Summer Opportunities web page houses additional resources and information.
Of course, not every internship you do as a prehealth student needs to be specifically health-related. You can also gain valuable service, leadership, teaching, and research experience—or pursue other talents—that will be relevant for a future in the health professions. Or you might want to explore another interest outside of healthcare this summer.
Handshake, overseen by the Center for Career Development, includes internship postings submitted to Princeton by employers. Use Career Development's comprehensive guides and internship web pages to broaden your search.
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Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Think of your own service-based internship that addresses a need in your home community and apply for funding through the Bogle Fellowship (first-years), Derian ProCES internship (sophomores and juniors), or another funding opportunity available through the Student Activities Funding Engine.
- If you can afford to work without pay and are interested in research, reach out to faculty at local colleges/universities whose work is of interest and see if they would accept a volunteer researcher. Write a professional email describing your interest in the work and attach a copy of your resume. Local medical schools and colleges and may also have funded summer undergraduate research programs.
- If you need to work, think about jobs that help you develop some of the core competencies sought in entering medical students. Anything where you work as part of a team and learn to communicate with others, especially those from backgrounds different from your own, can be very valuable.
- Reach out via the Princeton network to seek shadowing or even internship opportunities. Our HPA Shadowing Tips handout provides guidance on how to reach out.
- Google premed/prehealth advising offices at colleges and universities near home and see if they have ideas for local opportunities.
- If you’re working 40 hours per week, there’s plenty of time to work in some shadowing or volunteering around your job, but be sure to also leave yourself some downtime to recharge and come back refreshed next year!
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We’d first like to refer you to an excellent article written by prehealth alum Nanako Shirai for the Princeton OUR blog: What To Do When You’re Rejected From Both PICS and IIP. Her advice is excellent: expand your scope (she provides many helpful links) and don’t get overwhelmed. We can help you brainstorm as well if you come by during drop-in hours or make an appointment. For some specific examples of prehealth students’ summer experiences beyond PICS and IIP, check out the HPA Summer Spotlights.
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Every summer opportunity comes with benefits and limitations that you'll weigh to decide what best suits your needs and goals. Staying on campus can lay the groundwork for deep engagement in a lab that can last over multiple academic years, which is certainly a benefit. And of course, we have many top researchers and incredible facilities. What we don't have is an academic medical center, where education, research, and healthcare are prioritized in the same space, and where physicians, researchers, attendings, residents, medical students, and undergraduates are all working and learning alongside each other. If you're considering MD and MD/PhD, it can be extremely beneficial to see what it's like in an academic medical environment, find mentors at many stages of their professional development, and have easier access to shadowing and patient-facing volunteering. Other potential benefits: many schools with MD/PhD and/or biomedical research graduate programs design their summer experiences to help you make informed decisions between career paths; you gain exposure to a new context (maybe even at a grad/professional school you might like to attend); you may find more diversity in your peer cohort; you may gain new skills or perspectives that you can bring back to inform your research direction here at Princeton.
That said, if you find a great opportunity at Princeton versus one you're less excited about elsewhere, take the one at Princeton! You can find other ways to keep learning about the MD and MD/PhD career paths, find a practicing physician-scientist mentor, etc. If you do stay on campus, it wouldn't hurt to do some shadowing (minimally), or ideally, volunteer at the hospital, return to a clinical volunteer opportunity at home after your summer research has ended, or otherwise find ways to build your bedside manner and gain perspective of human illness and the patient experience through direct interaction with patients. -
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Q: I have some specific questions about a global health internship that I found in Vitals. How do I know if it’s legitimate or recommended by HPA? Who do I contact about the opportunity to learn more?
A: We advertise internships that sponsoring programs ask us to share with our students, but we do not necessarily endorse/recommend them. There are some abroad programs that can do more harm than good (see “Additional perspectives about international opportunities” on our website), so we try to screen those out of our listings, but it can be hard to judge from their websites. And if students reach out and tell us that they had a negative experience with an internship sponsor, we will often remove that internship from Vitals.
In terms of abroad opportunities, we have the most faith in the programs that are affiliated with the Office of International Programs, Global Health Programs/Center for Health and Wellbeing, and other Princeton offices that do more closely screen their sites, and provide support while you’re abroad. We list the sponsoring office/program with all of our Vitals links, and you should reach out to them directly with questions.
"Disadvantaged" Status
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These summer programs are referring to your journey to health professions relative to others who are pursuing these careers. Medical students are overwhelmingly from families in the top income brackets who, in addition to financial capital, also have the most “cultural capital” when it comes to family members and communities who can guide them through the written and unwritten rules associated with pursuing a college and medical school education.
These summer opportunities seek to even the playing field by making opportunities available to those who do not have the networks and resources through their communities that others do. They recognize how much value there is in having a diverse healthcare workforce.
We wish someone would find a better single-word descriptor than “disadvantaged”—the life skills, personal character, and perspective that you gain from navigating this “disadvantaged background” can really be an advantage moving into a professional career and caring effectively for patients, but it is the term we are currently stuck with.
In the medical school application process, you’ll again be asked if you’d like to self-identify as disadvantaged and if you do, you’re given space on the application to describe your background. We work closely with applicants to help them decide whether or not to check this box and how to craft this mini-essay. It can be a good opportunity to advocate for yourself, but you may also decide that you would rather not self-identify as disadvantaged or you may feel that you are not disadvantaged by this definition—it’s a personal choice and we’re happy to act as a sounding board for you as you decide what to do.