Summer internship with Northwestern medicine offers unique opportunity for premed students

A summer internship program led by a Glenview-based cardiologist offers a unique opportunity for students serious about a career in medicine.

Dr. Micah J. Eimer, medical director at the Northwestern Medicine Glenview Outpatient Center, oversees the program that gives premedical students a chance to shadow and learn from leading physicians.

This year's class of 43 students shadowed 45 physicians at locations including Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, outpatient centers in Glenview, Gurnee and Vernon Hills, and Northwestern Medicine Palos Hospital in Palos Heights.

Each student is assigned to a clinical department, where they work with, and report to, both a physician lead as well as a program administrator. Once a week, then, they rotate to observe a different specialty, according to a news release from Northwestern Medicine.

The internship is highly competitive, Eimer said, and the 43 students were accepted from 1,500 applicants. In the past four years, 143 students have completed the program, many of whom are now in medical school.

"We were targeting students in their junior or senior years of college who were pretty well determined that they were going to be going to medical school, and we were using this as a way to get them some exposure to clinical medicine and give them a research opportunity to see if we could help them evaluate where in medicine they saw their careers going," Eimer said.

While shadowing physicians, interns watch, listen and ask questions.

"We have partnered with various departments to host students at different clinical sites for one day a week, every week, where they can observe all the specialties of medicine, the medical and the surgical, and so hopefully get a feeling for what different areas of medicine are like," he said.

The internship program has continued through the pandemic, Eimer said, though the near-daily lectures have been delivered via Zoom rather than in-person. Precautions have been taken to ensure students do not encounter any patients known to have COVID-19 or are at high risk for contracting the virus.

In addition to shadowing physicians, each intern participates in a project they present to an audience at the end of the summer.

Eimer also is proud of the diversity of the internship program.

"We have a very diverse class this year," Dr. Eimer said. "I have a good feeling for the future of this field."

He said that, this year, 28% of the students are from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, most notably Howard University in Washington, D.C.

"I think that's a very unique aspect of this program, in that we have really tried to diversify the workforce and improve the pipeline to Northwestern Medicine of under-represented-in-medicine students."

In all, students come from 21 schools, including Northwestern University, Lake Forest College, Vanderbilt University, Western Kentucky University, University of Notre Dame and Miami University.