Hello reader! My name is Morganne, and I am a senior at Carolina, double-majoring in Biology (BS) and Psychology (BS) with a Chemistry minor. Thanks to the Gil Internship Program, I have been fortunate enough to intern at Holly Hill Hospital, a psychiatric treatment facility in Raleigh. I hope to become a psychiatrist myself someday, and even in the few weeks I have spent at Holly Hill thus far, I have already received a wealth of advice from the clinicians regarding careers in psychology. The diverse and experienced treatment team at Holly Hill, particularly my sagacious mentor Dr. Ahr, has been more than happy to talk with me about the challenges and rewards facing those who work in mental healthcare. I now have a better idea of what it entails to work with children as opposed to adults, as well as in a private versus a public setting. This experience has been unique, relative to other coursework, in that it has provided me with an invaluable, more developed sense of what to expect of daily life in my chosen career path, and furthermore a sense of direction regarding the type of work I would most passionately pursue as a psychiatrist. I am glad to say that I have enjoyed the internship so far; I am now able to say, with a far greater degree of certainty, that I want to spend my life practicing psychiatry.
Further, this internship has helped me gain a more solid confidence in my ability to handle “the real world” into which we must all eventually transition. Having primarily played the role of a student for the majority of my life, I worried that my strengths would fail to carry over into a job, and that I would be poorly suited to pursuits outside the academic realm, simply because academia has been the most prominent factor of my life so far. However, by putting me squarely into a professional job setting, the Gil internship has allowed me to prove to myself that I can be effective and capable of entering roles beyond that of a student, and beyond that, of helping people! I have learned to trust in my aptitude, and at the very least, my commitment to doing the best job I can, instead of wasting time worrying about failure.
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