Daniel Huynh, NUR ’23, Portland, Oregon
This summer, I had the opportunity to complete a 9-week Nursing Externship on the Solid Organ Transplant Floor at NYU Lagone Health’s Kimmel Pavillion. This floor focused on patients mainly receiving kidney and liver transplants, and pancreaticoduodenectomies, aka “whipples” for short. I chose to continue exploring this specialty this summer after completing one of my clinicals on the transplant floor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of my Junior year where I found working with this patient population to be very intellectually stimulating and rewarding.
Throughout the program, I worked one-on-one with an amazing team of nurses and grew both personally and clinically. Every day I came onto the floor, the nurses, care techs, and staff always greeted me with smiles and created a welcoming space for me to learn. Despite every day having a rollercoaster of tasks to complete, the nurses would always happily take the extra time to explain what they were doing. By working with these nurses closely, I was able to learn a lot of things that are only learned on the job. Additionally, something that I really loved about working on this floor was the use of translational services and culturally conscious care. Throughout these few weeks, I witnessed several nurses on my floor employ their second languages to provide care to patients from diverse cultural backgrounds. I found this to be really inspiring as one of my main goals when entering Penn was to break down cultural barriers in healthcare through language, so it was nice being able to use the French, Mandarin, and Vietnamese I know to build rapport with my patients and give them quality care in a language they’re comfortable with.
I am extremely honored to have an opportunity like this and work with such a resilient patient population as it’s not every day that you get to give everyone a second chance. I have learned so much from not just the nurses, but the patients as well. The nurses on this floor really created a strong clinical foundation for the rest of my nursing career and I leave this experience grateful to be one of the approximately 50 externs at the #3 hospital in the US.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2022 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here.
