Decisions, Decisions...

I will be doing my internship at the VA hospital in Palo Alto. The VA is a good fit for me because two of my main health interests are mental health and disability, two areas in which the VA offers a lot of services, given its population's needs. I'll most likely be working on their "Patient and Family Centered Care" initiative. I'd like to see how the team I'm working with goes about changing the way clinicians relate to their patients.

While I'm there, I just want to get a good feel for the hospital environment. I want to make the time to interview and shadow people in as many departments and roles as possible and sit in a lot of meetings. If I do this, and if I make real contributions to the project, I'll consider it a successful summer.

Deciding what to do this summer was a challenge for me. I really had to think about what was important to me in a summer internship. Mentoring? Future job opportunities? Exposure to an industry in which I don't plan to work? Fun? Confronting trade-offs and making decisions under uncertainty is an important leadership ability to develop, and the internship process was great practice!