Tufts Blogs

Every Community Health major at Tufts is required to complete an internship before they graduate. It is an incredible opportunity for professional development, and the department has countless resources connect students with opportunities in the Boston area. 

This semester, I am a Global Community Health intern at Partners in Health. Partners in Health is based out of the Prudential Center, which means that I get to finally live out my dream of working in the fanciest corporate building in Boston. I am also working with a research team at Harvard Medical School, so I split my time between the med school campus and the PIH office.

At the beginning of the internship, it was really intimidating to be surrounded by so many accomplished and intense people. I am not a medical student by any means (and I do in fact faint at the sight of blood) so I spent most of my first day at the med school dodging any potential patient interaction. 

However, as the internship went on, I realized how much there was to gain out of experiences at the medical school even if I am not a pre-medical student. I began to work on a qualitative research paper involving mental health in indigenous mothers in Guatemala. This paper was in three languages: English, Spanish, and ​​Tz’utujil. It was a super interesting challenge to work on translating the research across three separate languages and remain cohesive. 

Another project that I worked on was the production of a Community Health Worker spotlight podcast. I am super interested in multimedia production and was so thrilled to be able to work at the intersection of public health and media. I recorded podcasts, edited and worked in post-production, and posted them online. The stories of Community Health Workers often go unheard, and it was a pleasure to be able to platform these incredible people and the work they do.

Finally, I had to opportunity to work on another manuscript that we just sent off for publication! With the Partners in Health Liberia team, we reworked a manuscript from 2020 that was a Time-in-Motion study of CHWs in Liberia. I did a scoping review of literature from the last 6 years that updated the relevance of the manuscript and allowed it to be published with enough modern literature. This is my first authorship and I couldn’t be more excited!

Working with the Partners in Health team has not only developed my personal and professional skills, but has also opened my eyes to so many different possible career paths that I could take. I cannot recommend pursuing internships during your time at Tufts enough - and there is no shortage of opportunities available to do so. 

Until next time,

Joe