Clinical Center summer interns gain experience, foundation for future

Episode # 101
Uploaded: July 6, 2012
Running Time: 2:08

CROWN: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.

Summer internship opportunities at the NIH Clinical Center are a unique way for interested graduate, undergraduate and even high school students to gain experience in a clinical research setting. William Young, a graduate student at Catholic University of America, is interning with the Pain and Palliative Care Service.

YOUNG: It's rare to have such an experience where you can look at interviews, and you code things, and you do all these procedures. Everyone just talks about them in a book but you don't really have the practical hands-on experience unless you actually do it. When you can apply that knowledge, it really hammers it home.

CROWN: NIH is home to about 1,200 interns each summer. Institute training offices, such as the Clinical Center's Office of Clinical Research Training and Medical Education, tailor their programs to maximize the experience for summer students. High school senior Emma Davey says:

DAVEY: I've done summer programs before, studying things like the history of disease, genetics, and genomics. At NIH, it just gives you an intense experience that you just can't get at many other places. And it gives you the fundamentals for laboratory research that you wouldn't necessarily get at this point in your educational career. It just sets you up to have a good foundation for research experience in the future.

CROWN: For more information about the NIH Clinical Center's summer student internship program, visit training.nih.gov/trainees/summer_interns. From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Ellen Crown, at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

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