Rupal Wadhawan: wonderwoman? It might be a bit of an exaggeration, but we might convince you after hearing about Rupal’s uber-ambitious summer. Her Campus’s very own events coordinator spent the last three months living in her hometown of Tampa, Florida and interning at not one, but two local hospitals. Superwoman status? Maybe so.
Rupal wasn’t even doing the pesky intern tasks, a.k.a. shadowing doctors and remember the office’s Starbucks orders. This bubbly economics major tackled full-scale business administration projects at two separate health care centers. Sounds overwhelming, right? Not for Rupal. Not only did double up on internships, but she also made time to return to Italy, where she studied abroad this past fall.
During her first year, Rupal (like 70% of freshmen) wanted to be pre-med, but she soon realized that the business side of healthcare was of far more interest to her. Rupal’s internships confirmed her hunch.
“I really didn’t know too much about hospital administration at the beginning of the summer,” says Rupal. “But now I have such a good understanding of all the different branches of administration and what really goes into running a hospital.”
This understanding comes from working under the senior administrator at two different hospitals.
“One hospital is a non-for-profit children’s hospital, and the other is an adult hospital that is part of a larger, for-profit healthcare corporation,” says Rupal. “Hospitals are also run differently depending on non-profit or for-profit and the types of patients they cater to most, so I’ve gotten to learn about the particular details that different hospitals pay attention to when it comes to the patient experience.”
For her internship at All Children’s, Rupal worked through rotations within the finance, foundation and marketing departments. She learned everything from how to maintain great donor relationships (throw them snazzy parties, fyi) to number crunching to the ins-and-outs of the “Get Well Network,” the hospital’s on-demand television channel for patients.
Conversely, at St. Petersburg General, Rupal began the summer spending a few hours in each department and meeting with the directors. Once she had finished those rotations, Rupal was set to work on a number of assignments, including researching and rewriting hospital policies, creating nutrition information cards for patients with special diets and updating the “Heathcare News Network” a television network similar to the one at All Children’s but with one big difference: Rupal has a starring role.
“My voice will actually be the voiceover in the TV, which I think is pretty cool!” says Rupal. “I am really excited to see the things I’ve been working on become implemented into the hospital.”
After spending five days a week in two hospitals and touring the Amalfi coast of Italy with her family afterward, Rupal was ready to head back to Wake to tackle her senior year.
“I’m really looking forward to making the most of it and taking advantage of all the little things that I so often take for granted at Wake, like our gorgeous campus,” she says.
And of course she will be planning fantastic events for Her Campus, juggling her sorority, social life, coursework and planning ahead for graduate school. But for Rupal, the balancing act is simply second nature. Now that’s a skill Superwoman would be jealous of.