This fall, Health & Medicine welcomes our seventh cohort of interns in our Equity Intern Program: Nadine Cabo Chan, Mayra Miranda, and Patrick Ronan!

Nadine Cabo Chan is a first-year graduate student in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s joint degree program working towards a Master of Social Work and Master of Public Health.  She earned her BA in Psychology from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School University in New York before returning to her home state for graduate school.

Nadine has previously worked with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a start-up offering digital personalized mental health platform and app services, and the National Eating Disorders Association. As a generalist social work student, she also works at a local non-profit social services agency as a clinical intern. Her public health interests lie in assessing opportunities for prevention and promoting health equity, particularly for communities of color and other minoritized populations. She has spent multiple years creating social media posts; managing social media accounts; and conducting data analytics, outreach, and event promotion and believes social media is a great opportunity to disseminate information, engage in advocacy, and promote Health & Medicine’s work.

Expanding on her work from her Summer 2022 internship, Mayra Miranda, Fall 2022 Ben Squires Equity Intern, is a Master of Public Health student at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Community Health Sciences division. Originally from Chicago, she graduated with her BA in Gender and Women Studies from UW-Madison in 2014 and her BSN from Resurrection University in 2017.

Before working as Registered Nurse in community health and care management at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in Chicago, Mayra completed an AmeriCorps term as a Health Educator at a school-based health center in North Lawndale. Mayra is passionate about preventative health and empowering community members to be participants in their health through education and advocacy. She enjoys volunteering, reading, and trying new restaurants.

Patrick Ronan is a second-year Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) student at Loyola University of Chicago, where he also earned his BA in Economics. Patrick came to Health & Medicine because of his belief that medical policy is a core tentpole area that has affects all policy areas and is the most important area of policy research. As an equity intern under the Schweitzer Fellowship, he collects and analyzes data of Schweitzer alumni in order to increase response, and attendance, and overall engagement, part of Patrick’s interest in the empirical aspects of policy creation and fascination with long-term policy foci. Through union organizing for both apartment tenants and graduate students, Patrick has developed a strong passion for social justice.

Outside of Health & Medicine, he is an avid reader and amateur writer who enjoys exploring coffee shops and nightlife in the Rogers Park neighborhood where he resides.

In 2018, Health & Medicine created an Internship Equity Committee charged with developing a new model for internships, called the Equity Intern Program, in which unpaid intern labor is replaced with a paid internship model, and for which we established a “one door” application process so that opportunities are not limited to the well-connected. Providing paid internships is an important step toward creating and sustaining a diverse, equitable, accessible, and inclusive workforce.

A successful internship can be an integral part of a person’s education and professional development. Our internship program supports the next generation of professionals who share the belief in our mission of health equity and social justice. Our interns are largely graduate students in the Chicagoland area interested in gaining experience in public health. Health & Medicine supports three cohorts of three interns per year, for a total of nine interns.