Week 6: Personal Contributions

As my internship is ending with Sports Medicine, I have been able to reflect on my experience and my personal contributions to my internship site. Overall, I believe that I was able to gain a lot of insight into the job of athletic training and work on a lot of clinical and administrative projects. One of the projects that I was able to work on this summer was preparing for the arrival of the incoming freshmen athletes and transfer students for all sixteen sports. As a part of this project, I would need to create a new medical profile for each athlete which included a variety of medical information, such as heart rate and pulse. Along with this, I would also set up their account for the drug testing portal. This is especially important to contribute towards the mission of Sports Medicine and for the benefit of the athletes to ensure that they are performing at their highest potential. Part of this project included going through the current athletes’ profiles and ensuring that they were up to date, as well as archiving any of those who had graduated. Through my project of going through all of these profiles I have been able to familiarize myself with specific medical terminology that I will encounter in my future career in reading patient charts.

Another one of my projects that I was assigned to this summer allowed me to explore beyond the side of physical health and investigate the mental health resources for student athletes on campus. Dr. Turk is the athletic department’s Staff Psychologist and specializes in a multitude of topics; her main ones are working with trauma survivors, eating concerns, and student athletes. Beginning last spring, Dr. Turk established the Female Athlete Body Project, whose goal is to reduce eating disorders in the female student athlete population. Over this summer, I was able to work with Dr. Turk in administering the mental health screenings to the incoming freshmen and transfers on their first day on campus. While the men solely took the mental health screening, I also administered the eating disorder screening on the female athletes. In the future, I would like to further contribute the projects I worked on this summer by continuing them over the school year. One way I believe I can do this is through conducting research about eating disorders in female athletes and potential ways to combat them in order to not only ensure the athletes are healthy physically, but mentally as well.