Name: Stacy
Year: Senior
Major(s): Biological Sciences
Minor(s): Asian American Studies
CFS Program: Field Studies in Public Health
Employer: Heartland Human Care Services, Inc.
Throughout my time at Northwestern, many of my friends have recommended CFS to me; it wasn’t until my penultimate quarter at Northwestern that I was able to participate. This quarter I am interning at a refugee and asylee resettlement agency in Chicago, where I work with the Medical Case Manager to address both medical and non-medical needs of refugees. I learned very early on that the nature of a refugee’s life is unpredictable; displacement affects people in ways far beyond the physical, affecting the very day-to-day familiarities – language, transportation, technology – that we take for granted. Consequently, my work varied day to day. Some days, I accompanied participants to medical appointments, helping navigate public transportation and a stubbornly opaque healthcare system; other days, I would help families apply for state IDs and social security cards. This internship has exposed me to direct service work and how it operates within its constrained resources to realize its mission of equity and opportunity for all.
As an aspiring physician, I am eager to discover ways to be a patient advocate outside the narrow context of a doctor-patient relationship. The gaps in the healthcare system become much more apparent from the perspective of someone the system is not built for – non-native English speaker, poor, disabled, non-citizen – than from my own experience as a U.S. citizen from a upper-middle class suburb of Detroit. But beyond a more explicit awareness of these disparities, my internship has shown me that social work and healthcare have more overlap than I had previously imagined. Perhaps surprisingly, my internship this quarter has expanded and nuanced my approaches to direct service provision, as well as giving me firsthand experience to the structures that this work operates within. There are ways that my agency acts as a temporary measure, guiding the very bare minimum to get people going with their lives in the United States, but is unable to break the barriers of language and employment, classism and racism, that continue to hinder the lives of our participants when they leave our doors. However, with an awareness of these structures, our agency is able to substantively impact the lives of our participants by addressing emergent needs in the present and promoting self-sufficiency for the future.
The skills and philosophies I’ve learned from this internship could never have been taught in a classroom; only through granular interactions with participants, sitting on trains and communicating through our only common language of hand gestures, and observing the agency staff who dedicate their lives to this line of work, was I able to see how providers can truly serve others despite the contradictions that persist. We discussed in our Field Studies in Public Health seminar about the roles of healthcare and public health, and how these two fields diverge and converge. In my internship, I found that the macro or the micro are not sufficient on their own; both are necessary to effect any sort of change. Through the Chicago Field Studies program, I was able to experience this dynamic firsthand by engaging in an experience that will undoubtedly guide my medical training and my practice as a physician.