An extraordinary internship opportunity
For recent college graduates planning a career in healthcare, Alpine Surgical offers a unique and comprehensive internship program. It exposes future providers to all aspects of a busy, private surgical practice to help them develop critical thinking and communications skills, gain real-world experience observing live surgical cases and better understand the business side of the practice, including scheduling, triage, insurance, coding and billing. When their internship is completed, they will be far ahead of their colleagues when starting their professional degree programs and clinical rotations!
I started my internship at Alpine Surgical during my second year of college, at a time when I was still exploring whether medicine was the right career for me. Without any prior experience and no family members in healthcare, I entered the office with very little exposure to the medical field. I hadn’t even taken a basic anatomy course, so the language of medicine and clinical decision-making were entirely new to me. Looking back now after three and a half years at Alpine Surgical, I can see how much knowledge and confidence I have grown through this amazing program. My experience as an intern ultimately solidified my passion for medicine, helped prepare me for a successful medical school application process, and gave me a clinical framework that I will continue to build upon as I start my training this summer.
What made this internship so unique was its active learning model that could not be replicated in the classroom. Rather than simply observing, as interns we were encouraged to actively participate in patient care by preparing charts, gathering histories, presenting cases, scribing office visits, reviewing imaging, assisting with office procedures, and discussing disease processes as well as surgical reasoning. Through conversations with peers, I came to appreciate how uncommon this level of involvement is prior to medical school, and how much it accelerated my ability to think through patient care in a structured way. Every day I was excited to return to the office, not only because of the people I worked with, but because every day brought new opportunities to learn. Being immersed in this environment with repeated exposure to a wide range of cases helped me connect classroom learning to real clinical cases which made new knowledge tangible and grounded in patient care.
Beyond developing clinical reasoning, this internship also strengthened my confidence in interacting with patients and solidified my decision to pursue a career in medicine. Observing providers communicate complex information with clarity and compassion highlighted the kind of impact I hope to have in my own career and reinforced my goal of becoming a physician who builds trust through education, empathy, and collaborative decision-making. In my support role, I was able to begin practicing some of these skills in smaller capacities such as perioperative education, telephone triage, and procedure prep. These interactions were important in my preparation for applying to medical school, providing real encounters and stories that helped me clearly convey my motivation for medicine and the kind of physician I hope to become.
I am very grateful to everyone at Alpine Surgical for the mentorship and support that shaped my growth over these past years. Leaving the office was bittersweet because Alpine Surgical really did become a second home, but it feels full circle to carry everything I learned here into the next chapter of my journey toward becoming a physician!
