My name is Shruthi Bhimaraju, and I am a third-year pursuing an education focused in global public health and biology. Ever since middle school, I have been interested in a career as a physician. After volunteering at both large hospitals and smaller local clinics, I have become increasingly interested in how hospitals work behind the scenes. While I still aim to become a physician, my long term goal is to become a changemaker who uses entrepreneurial thinking to affect significant global health issues. With millions of people in rural and underprivileged communities suffering from a lack of access to proper healthcare, innovative thinking is desperately needed.
My newfound passion for entrepreneurship led me to pursue an internship that would give me the ability to understand the healthcare system from multiple perspectives. Fortunately, I had the privilege of joining the 2021 Royster-Lawton Cohort. Jill Royster and Drew Lawton funded my endeavors working in social entrepreneurship, and I received coaching from Laura Toscano, the Associate Director of Social Entrepreneurship, to explore different internship opportunities.
In the months leading up to my fellowship, I was unsure about what path to take - there were so many options. Laura and I sat down and created a plan for how I would approach the large field of health policy enterprises. She taught me how to use LinkedIn to my advantage and how to improve my resume, and she helped me to feel more comfortable with the internship search process. Among the many diverse options I explored, I decided on an internship through our very own UVA Health System.
For 3 months, I worked alongside influential employees of different sectors, all working together for one common initiative - personalized medicine. Personalized medicine combines patient advocacy, molecular biology research, and social outcomes research so that families can benefit from treatment tailored for every individual patient. My work focused specifically on families suffering from Congenital Heart Disease, a disorder that affects millions globally.
There were two primary aspects to the work I did this summer - molecular biology research and social outcomes research. Coming into this work, I expected my existing knowledge of statistics to be grandly useful; however, this was not exactly the case. Knowing the fundamentals was helpful, but the multidimensional way that numbers are calculated was unlike what I had ever learned, and the experience was eye-opening. I learned different statistical tests and techniques used by health systems globally from experts in the field. The aspect of global translatability throughout all of the work we did taught me how the social issues we aim to find solutions for do not stop with just patients from UVA Health systems.
I am still in awe of all the changemaking that I was able to accomplish during my internship. As a Social Entrepreneurship minor, I am able to take unique classes that improve the way I find solutions to the issues I am passionate about. And with the help of the Social Entrepreneurship team and Jill Royster and Drew Lawton, I saw first-hand how impactful and rewarding working in this field can truly be.