Hello everyone! I’m Arianna and I am interning with The Rodham institute at Georgetown university, DC. Founded in 2013 by Dr. Jehan (Gigi) El-Bayoumi in honor of Ms. Dorothy Rodham, The Rodham Institute focuses on providing the underserved populations of Washington DC with resources to improve health equity in the district. My first task after arriving in the city last Sunday was to meet up with all my mentors – Dr. Gigi, Tracie, Kristina, and Veronica – for lunch on Monday.
This meeting’s goal was to establish a personal connection with the people I will be working closest with during this internship, discuss more in-depth the role the Institute has in the battle against healthcare disparities, and the importance of this job in all of our lives.During this time I got to know my mentors really well, as well as they got to know me, and I was provided with more inside knowledge about the needs in the community. By the end of if, I had gained four new colleagues and I felt better prepared about what to expect during my time here.
On Tuesday I was scheduled to be with Mrs. Kristina all day, so she drove me all over the city, talked to me about the way DC is divided, where most hospitals and fresh food stores are located, some of the history of the city, and showed me around the areas we will be working on primarily. This was especially interesting to me because I had not thought about the reality of the country’s capital, the inequality and inaccessibility to resources for so many, before coming here. She also took me to Dr. Gigi’s workplace, since I was scheduled to be with her the next day, and made sure I knew my way around some bus stops. When I got to the place I will call home for the next couple of weeks, I went to the grocery store, continued settling into my room, and I got to know one of my roommates – all medical students at Georgetown – and asked her a million questions about her journey to become a physician.
On Wednesday I had my first physician shadowing experience working with Dr. Gigi and her team. I was with two aspiring medical students doing a program at Georgetown and Dr. Gigi’s physicians assistant Paet from Palestine. Together we spoke to patients about their lives, experiences with the healthcare system, and reason for visiting that day before Dr. Gigi came into the room to examine them. It was a great learning experience for us because Dr. Gigi has an extraordinarily diverse array of patients – one of them we did not get to talk much to because he speaks Arabic primarily, so the aspiring medical students and I spent most of his visit observing how Paet and him conversed while Paet took notes, and then when Dr. Gigi arrived it was more Arabic being spoken! This was a great opportunity for us to watch and learn because Paet had to take a more leading role, and Dr. Gigi made him responsible for telling her about the patient, a task we would all help with in other cases. The day ended early because Dr. Gigi dismissed us. She likes taking a lot of time with each patients – about 30 minutes per patient as opposed to other physicians who take about 5 minutes with each – and her last patient could not make it in time. After that I walked a lot around the city and went home to debrief for the day. This time I encountered another one of my three roommates and flooded her with questions too.
On Thursday I was with Mrs. Kristina again, further discussing the disparities in the DC community and the spreading of social awareness The Rodham Institute does to educate the
people here, and she made me a manager for the Institute’s social media pages, so that is something I will be working on too as an intern. We worked together to review the Rodham Institute’s website before it is launched to ensure that everything was in its correct place and working properly and emailed out whatever needed to be fixed. then, we went out and she game me a tour of the campuses of some colleges I am interested in in DC.
Because of the Parade that would take place this weekend and concerns about protests spreading from Downtown to Georgetown, she offered to have me stay with her in a part of the city that is further away from Downtown, and I accepted. 
She picked me up on Friday, and since then I have been staying at her home with her, her husband, and their cat Sebastian. We have gone out, mainly to Maryland, and have been having a great time together, going to thrift stores and estate sales, dining out and exploring more college campuses and history, all the while I have been working on my Internship Project – assigned to me by my mentor Mrs. Tracie – in my free time.
I can’t wait to see what the next weeks here will be like and deepening my understanding of healthcare disparities and the work that goes behind tackling the root causes to eventually close the gap of inequity in the system of the city, and eventually bigger areas than DC. Thank you so much everyone for reading! I can not wait to see how this journey helps me grow as a person!
There are no comments published yet.