The following was written by former UGA Women’s Tennis student-athlete, Mariana Gould. Mariana is currently pursuing her Master’s of Public Health degree from the College of Public Health.
This summer I was fortunate enough to intern at Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital in the Graduate Medical Education department. Here, the program managers and doctors work together to create a curriculum for incoming doctors who will be completing their residency in Internal Medicine. This is a fairly new residency program and I was lucky enough to be there to see the program’s first graduating class as well as the orientation for the new incoming residents. These doctors came from everywhere in the world from Ghana to Dominican Republic to Argentina, Cameroon, Nigeria, and many other countries. It was a great experience to see what young doctors right out of medical school go through.
I was also lucky enough that my supervisors were Georgia graduates from my same program. We were able to talk about the classes that we took and which professors we had. For someone who hasn’t been in the work force, yet I was able to pick their brains about what they did after graduation, what they thought they wanted to do, and how they got the position they were in now. This was a great part of my experience because not only did I get field experience, but I was able to learn firsthand accounts of what worked for them, what didn’t work, and what they would suggest once I graduate. Another very important aspect of my internship to me was being able to create relationships with my supervisors and others that I worked with.
Like I said above, my internship was at Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital in the Graduate Medical Education department. A typical day for me was arriving between 8:00 and 9:00 AM (it depended on whether there was a presentation from a resident that morning or not), work on the projects I was given until around 11:55 AM when my supervisors and I would go to noon conference which was when a faculty member of the program or any of the residents presented something they had been working on, and then it was back to the office to work on any of the projects given. Before this experience, I had no idea how busy and how many moving parts go into having a residency program. It takes a lot of people to help run it smoothly and at the GME office at Piedmont Athens Regional they do a great job of this.
Being able to be in the field and work alongside professionals was a great experience and will help me further my career. I saw how things worked as well as implement things that I learned in class. I loved the professionalism I saw and was surrounded by and the overall experience of interning in the field I hope to make a career in.
Aside from all this, my experience as a student athlete at the University of Georgia has really helped me in the working world. It taught me so much about discipline and hard work. Being a student athlete really gives you a great base to start building your professional life and career off of. Being on a team all working towards the same goal is something that, as student athletes, we are already very familiar with and a lot of people who are right out of college do not have. Overall, I had a great experience and learned a lot from my internship experience and gained a lot of knowledge that will help me in my future career.
