2min read • 7 months ago
Written by Tanimomo Isaac
To explore the realities of the everyday life of an intern.
Medical Laboratory Science Interns, challenges, workload, hospital systems
Explorative essay
“To get internship no be beans o”
This single sentence carries the weight of every MLS graduate who has ever checked their SMS a hundred times a day, waiting for an offer that keeps not coming. This is not an exaggeration but a lived truth. You spend years in university, surviving practicals, grinding through theory, managing one exam after another, only to graduate and discover that the real hustle has not even started yet.
The struggle for placement usually begins before the ink on your certificate even dries off. Graduation timeline rarely aligns neatly with hospital intake windows, so many fresh graduates are left floating in an uncomfortable hanging situation - seeing yourself as being qualified but unplaced. And with desperate times that call for desperate actions, you find yourself applying to multiple hospitals across different states simultaneously, following up with emails, tracking every announcement posted in MLS alumni groups, and submitting letters at facilities you have to visit yourself and those you have never even visited. The emotional, physical, and financial toll of this period is just too real. And in all of this, the love letters(rejections) pile up quietly while questions you do not have good answers to starts coming up.
And then, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, a senior colleague sends a message. Attached is a list of names. Your name is on it. In that moment, the few seconds between reading the message and truly believing it becomes one of the purest feelings you will experience in this journey. The relief, the joy, the disbelief all mix into something that is hard to put into words. But then again that joy is only the beginning of a new chapter. Because from the moment you step through those hospital doors as an intern, you will move, sometimes faster than you are ready for, from someone thrilled to have a placement to someone quietly counting down to the end of their posting.
This article is for the one in between those two points, trying to figure out how to survive and actually learn something in the process.