NYC: What does shadowing and living here look like?

    Coming into summer immersion, I had a lot of expectations. I thought life in New York City would be very fast. I thought life in the hospital would be continuous with no breathing moments. But so far, life in the city and the hospital has fed me much better things than I could have hoped for. 

    Right after orientation on Monday, I met with my clinical mentor, Dr. Marshall Glesby. He is the director of Clinical Trial research in HIV and also serves as an attending in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine. Our meeting was an absolute splendor as Dr. Glesby walked me through the pathogenesis of HIV infection as well as clinical implications for patients living with HIV (PLWH). I was able to learn of current projects as well as completed projected from current and past students in his laboratory as well as his collaborations. Dr. Glesby had gone ahead to make a structured schedule for most of my summer immersion in which he had reached out to collaborators and professors that he knew would spark my interest and scheduled meetings with them on my behalf. We also discussed a specific paper that would be the basis for my mini-research project which would be centered on determining correlations between biomarkers of inflammation and T cell counts in aging patients PLWH as predictors of psycho-social behavior and cognitive function of these patients. To follow up, I met with my second mentor, Dr. Carrie who started me off on the resources to begin planning my research project and potential hypothesis to think through for my project.

    Through the week, I was able to join Dr. Glesby at his rounds with his fellow and other medical students in the Division of Infectious Disease (ID). Through this times, I have been exposed to patients with diverse underlying conditions who have had opportunistic infections either from bacterial or fungal infestation which has opened my mind to the need for an ID department in every hospital. Outside of hospital rounds, I was able to meet Dr. Brad Jones and Dr. Jones, HIV research specialists, who shared their insight on the different therapies their labs pursue to provide treatments and a cure for HIV. 

    I have two highlights for the week. The first being my though process after our introductory meeting with the Radiology team. Learning about the research interests of my peers made me realize that the lack of strong immune response to either infection or complications in the human body is the basis on which every field of medicine builds. If the body could single handedly manipulate all possible processes to avoid infection or organ failures/ complications, medicine would not exist and there would be no need for scientific research. The second highlight of my week was hearing from Dr. Jones that my meeting with him was the highlight of his day. 

    The week has been nothing short of amazing and I look forward to all my meetings and learning new things in the coming week through my mentors and other professionals I meet here at Weill.

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