Name: Alice Podolsky
Class Year: 2020
Major: Psychology
Hometown: Rockport, Maine
Internship Organization: Maine Medical Center (MMC)
Job Title: Pediatric psychiatrist intern and research assistant
Location: Portland, Maine (but done remotely from Rockport)
Things are majorly happening at my internship! I was lucky enough to be a part of a pilot study last year in which my supervisor, Dr. Roslyn Gerwin, began implementing a new screening tool to better assess the mental health of all the patients we see at the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital (BBCH) at MMC. This initiative was taken on in response to the staggering increase in completed suicides and suicide attempt admissions across the nation, and even at Barbara Bush. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for children aged 10-24, killing thousands across America each year. The problem that my supervisor, and other mental health practitioners nationally, began noticing was that the children and adolescents being admitted for suicide attempts did not often screen positive for depression, the main diagnosis that we associate with suicidality.
By looking at the value of our added screening tools over the past year, we have seen that many admissions at BBCH, even those not admitted for suicide attempts or psych related diagnoses, screen positive for anxiety, depression, and/or substance use. This project has broadened into something much more fascinating, as we now have access to data that goes far beyond suicide attempts, and into what long-term illnesses are associated with which mental health struggles. Which services in the hospital are sending us most of the psych consults? How do number of follow-ups correlate with the things they screened positive for? Who came back in and why? How many patients were new? What ages were they? How has suicide attempt data changed? There are so many fascinating things to explore, so right now, my supervisor and I are sifting through the data and finding interesting topics to start writing about, with an end goal of getting several papers published. The greatest skills I am learning are to find what excites me and my interests. Dr. Gerwin has taught me that writing a paper for publishing isn’t about getting all the data out, it is about telling a narrative, one which the writer is profoundly connected to. It has been amazing getting to suss out what that is for me.
I applied for this internship kind of by luck! I knew Maine Medical Center was the place to be in terms of clinical mental health exposure and practice as well as research opportunities. I emailed the head of internship coordinations and told her about my specific interest in helping someone, a doctor, social worker, whomever, out in psych, preferably child psych. I was swiftly connected with the supervisor of the department and she told me about how Dr. Gerwin, the primary child psychiatrist for the BBCH, was starting a project that would likely welcome the assistance of an intern! The rest is history!
Dr. Gerwin only ended up being the coolest woman ever, so, naturally, I was asking about coming back for another summer this year. I guess something special about how I found this internship was the mere fact that it existed, help was needed, but no one had asked about it or thought about it yet. If there is a place or a thing you are particularly interested in, tell someone! Email them! You never know how much an organization might value you, even if they aren’t advertising an internship for you. Additionally, the opportunity to get paid through Bryn Mawr only increases your chances of getting to work with someone or something that really interests you because outside funding (or the ability to work unpaid) is a huge incentive for them to host you. This incentive, coupled with pure passion and flexibility, is what I believe made this internship happen for me—I don’t see why it would be any different for you!
Visit the Summer 2020 Internships page to read more student stories.