Introduction
Medical Internship – The classroom can provide you with the knowledge you need in the outside world. You get to learn from your colleagues and teachers, which can be really beneficial. But the knowledge you gain from the practical field is quite different. One instance of a practical field is going for a medical internship in a different country for a short period of time. This means leaving your comfort zone to explore real experience in the medical field. It may sound daunting, but you gain invaluable experience from it.
You gain more practical knowledge from real situations, which is very different from what’s taught in the classroom or what you learn from reading textbooks. Spending your internship abroad is an opportunity to turn abstract medical theories into practice, in a setting you’re not accustomed to. Engaging in a medical internship abroad goes a long way in developing your network with medical professionals and nurturing your knowledge for a better professional career path.
That said, here are four benefits of getting a medical internship abroad:
1. Develop Your Medical Skills With Practical Mentorship
Getting a medical internship abroad helps in developing your medical skills in a different way through practical mentoring. This means you don’t work alone and you get to work with experienced medical personnel on the field from different part of the world that’ll give you meaningful insight into the medical world by assigning certain tasks to you.
Of course, these personnel will not leave you alone as people’s lives are at stake. But they do become your mentors and monitor how you utilize your skills and knowledge while gaining more experience.
A professional internship agency like International Medical Aid offers you the opportunity to intern with fellows and medical professionals with decades’ worth of experience in impoverished communities and third-world countries that need vital medical help. Furthermore, you get to apply your skills and knowledge in practical situations with other foreign interns, which may lead to forming meaningful international friendships.
2. Outstanding Addition To Your Curriculum Vitae
Through this clinical exposure, you can get opportunities to expand your clinical research and receive glowing recommendation letters from your mentors and healthcare centers with and for whom you’ve worked, which will really boost your CV. With such a distinguished background, people could easily conclude that you’re truly committed and have extensive experience in the medical field.
When applying for competitive, top-rated medical schools and institutions, an international internship on your CV will place you among the cream of the crop, the distinguished few who spent their time advocating for a cause in a community that needed help the most. Nowadays, many medical schools and employers are in need of people with unique experiences to add a meaningful impact to their practice. In fact, some organizations screen applicants automatically by carefully scrutinizing their CVs.
Professional experience from another country is an outstanding addition to your CV. Your participation in volunteer work abroad not only says a lot about how competent you are in dealing with people from dissimilar walks of life, but it also says something about you as a human being.
3. Figure Out Your Medical Specialization
Volunteering for medical work abroad can help you in etching out a career path in the competitive medical field. The medical field has different branches, ranging from nursing, dentistry, pediatrics, physiology, psychiatry, nutrition, neurology, gynecology, to the surgical field. All these fields require different skills and techniques which are very important qualities to excel well in them.
An international internship deals you the opportunity to experience what it’s like to work in certain fields—for real. You get to see and work with different specialists in their chosen field. You get to practice techniques you’ve only read in books before. And your mentors could even share their experiences with you while you also learn by observing how they deal with certain situations.
This extensive exposure may help you in figuring out the medical field you’d want to specialize in to narrow your path. If your clinical exposure helps in figuring you career path, this would definitely strengthen the passion needed to excel in it.
4. Experience In Foreign Healthcare Systems
A medical internship abroad exposes you to a truly global healthcare system. In this short period of clinical exposure, you wouldn’t be mentored alone but training yourself to be flexible enough to adapt to different workplace situations and environments. You can receive vital information on how another country’s methods work and apply what you’ve learned in the establishment you’ll work in. This includes treatment procedures, administration of medicines, medicine production, among others.
By being immersed in your host country’s healthcare system, your knowledge and skills will improve when you start attending to different medical conditions and challenges. Also, countries with poor medical facilities have a way of making up for what they lack through other innovative practices of which you may not have heard. All these are beneficial to your medical career.
Conclusion
Medical internships abroad may appear challenging, but the benefit you reap from this experience can’t remain overemphasized. Nowadays, more and more people are finding means of getting different internships abroad because they know how it can strengthen their practice, passion, knowledge, skills, network, and experience in different medical fields. Register with a credible medical internship agency to be one step closer to achieving your dream.