Reema Choueiri '25: RISE Fellowship, through Pace

Welcome to Summer Spotlight: where Health Professions Advising (HPA) explores the summer experiences of our students.

Reema Choueiri '25 spent her junior summer collaborating with the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute for the Recognizing Inequities and Standing for Equality (RISE) Fellowship Program, through Pace.

Reema Choueiri standing on a pier

As a student in the Class of 2025, majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology along the Pre-Medical track, I was looking to spend my final summer with Princeton by diving into a novel topic. As I explored the offerings of the Pace Center, I was most compelled to the organizations listed through the Recognizing Inequities and Standing for Equality (RISE) Fellowship Program. RISE internships focus on addressing the establishment and growth of racial equity across many fields, including the healthcare industry. Acknowledging identity and reflecting on the role of one’s own experiences is a central component of the RISE program, and I believe that the program allowed me to further analyze the influences of intersectionality within my own identity.

I collaborated with the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, which serves communities in the state by assessing and improving health care quality, treatment standards, and patient experiences. The Quality Institute's goal is to create greater accessibility and equality for patients, while also supporting the work of other community-based organizations as they adopt new medical policies or fight for legislative changes. On a day-to-day basis, I attended internal meetings, taking notes and listening to the progress of other staff members on projects related to policy making, funding, and even hospital transparency efforts. Besides these, I worked most closely with the Quality Institute’s maternal health sector; I took the initiative to investigate the status of oral health care for children under the age of six in the state of New Jersey.

In particular, I performed an experimental secret shopper study, cold-calling dental offices listed on New Jersey Medicaid directories specifically for children six-years-old and under. By pretending to be a mother attempting to make a new patient appointment for a two-year-old child, I called 824 dental offices across the state, and discovered that only 404 offices, or about 49%, were willing to see a two-year-old patient. In doing so, I revealed that there were several inconsistencies in the public directories and a severe lack of accessibility of oral health care for those covered by Medicaid insurance. I prepared this study by interpreting and visualizing the data using R programming, and compiled a report that the Quality Institute intends to use to advocate for large scale modifications to medical policy and transparency between insurance companies and the public.

Ultimately, I envision this data serving populations in New Jersey, particularly those with young children. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve others and to be able to contribute this information for New Jersey families and organizations. My advice for students as they approach the internship search is not to limit yourself. Try everything and explore every option, as you never know what you’ll come to enjoy. Also remember that as an intern, you should hold yourself with humility, ask questions, and say “yes” to as much as you can, learning from all tasks, no matter how small. Who knows – you might become a “medical detective” for a summer, just like me.

Read more about what Haley did last summer