Intern might be her official title at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota. But these days, Laura Somppi ’17 is really more of a hospital ninja.
Thanks to her employee key card, she effortlessly glides through busy corridors before ducking into secretive back hallways. During the day, she slips in and out of rounds with medical fellows—just a fly on the wall, don’t mind her. Once, Somppi even glanced at a chest X-ray out of curiosity and successfully diagnosed pneumonia.
Yet as comfortable as she might appear, the Sartell, Minn. native still finds herself overcome with childlike glee when her card magically opens each hospital door.
“I can’t believe I get to go anywhere,” Somppi says, smiling. “People will ask me what year I am (in medical school), and it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m an undergrad.’”
Somppi always knew she wanted to be a doctor. A psychology major with a neuroscience concentration, she worked as a lifeguard and enjoyed “being a caretaker” to kids at the pool. Watching “Grey’s Anatomy” planted a seed, too.
Getting to Children’s Hospital started with a medical mishap of her own. While laid up with a sprained ankle, Somppi spun her unfortunate bout of immobility into an internship search. Anupam Kharbanda ’93, research director in pediatric emergency medicine at the Minneapolis hospital, was the first to respond to her e-mail inquiry.
“I thought it would be good for her to get some insight as to how a hospital works—and specifically, what an ER doctor does. The ER is the nexus of so many different areas: orthopedic surgery, general surgery, neurosurgery, radiology. This is really where you get to see all the various people interacting and working together,” Kharbanda says.
As an alumnus, Kharbanda knows what kind of drive Carleton students have. He also knows how much has changed since he was in college and medical school. It’s why he emphasized “in-depth experience in research training” for Somppi’s internship, starting with an expansive patient data project. Now in her second summer at Children’s, Somppi’s goal is to get a paper published.
“It used to be that working in a lab over the summer was good enough,” says Kharbanda, who also attended the University of Iowa and Columbia University. “But now, a lot of students have to have something published—in fact, multiple papers published. So you have to know the format. You have to know how to refine the comments. It’s a process that can take 18 months.”
Task No. 1 when Somppi arrived: Pull more than 500 patient charts and break down the data to track the amount of radiation given to children. Kharbanda specifically wanted to isolate how much radiation was delivered to children with neck injuries.
Due to the radiation-sensitive thyroid, Kharbanda believes that studying the potential negative effects of those doses—and limiting them when possible—could be useful to hospital emergency rooms nationwide. His research revolves around the practice of ALARA—As Low As Reasonably Achievable—a safety principle for minimizing radiation doses and releases of radioactive material “by employing all reasonable methods.”
“When you’re in the ER, there isn’t a lot of time to make a decision. And a lot of doctors err on the side of more imaging just to rule out cervical spine injuries,” Somppi says. “We wanted to look at how trends for those scans with radiation play out over age groups, see any previous research with those age groups … and figure out how to use that data to make a better protocol.”
While crunching data and reviewing medical journals swallowed up the majority of her first year as an intern, this summer has placed Somppi in a more collaborative role with Kharbanda. When they meet to review the information she has gathered, Somppi finds herself back in a Carleton state of mind.
“Any question that I have, I blurt it out. It’s a teaching hospital,” Somppi says. “And I’ve learned to ask questions at Carleton. The teachers are on your level in a lot of ways. You can call them by their first name. So while I’ve been here, it’s just been an extension of that.”
Kharbanda has also been generous about letting Somppi into the hospital’s inner sanctum. But it comes with added responsibility and perspective. “Ten-year-olds handling things that I couldn’t think about handling,” Somppi says—a private peek behind the curtain that, while sobering, has confirmed that pediatric medicine is the career path for her.
“I had to take a step back and process it all. This is serious,” Somppi says. “Yes, people are going to die. Not everyone can be saved. But seeing a doctor help someone … those are the moments I focus on. Those are the moments that let me know this is what I want to do.”
Our summer intern profiles focus on domestic and international internships funded by generous Carleton donors through the Career Career. Funds are competitively awarded each year, with applications evaluated on the basis of merit and financial need.