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Claire Ostertag-Hill in Corvallis, OR
(Morgan Siegel )
Claire Ostertag-Hill in Loni, India during her 2013 internship.
Class of 2015 member Claire Ostertag-Hill, 21, had a long commute to the June 13 commencement ceremony at Oregon State University.
After finishing the requirements for honors degrees in biology, psychology, and international studies, she left Corvallis two weeks early to begin an internship at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.
She's powering full-speed ahead to her future medical career.
Ostertag-Hill, who has lived in Germany, Virginia, India and Oregon, spent her undergraduate career preparing for medical school, which she'll begin in August 2015.
She interned from September to December 2013 in Loni, India, at Pravara Medical Institute (PMI). She received the internship through an organization called IE3 Global. She went on rounds with doctors, local medical students, and other interns.
Ostertag-Hill shadowed doctors in PMI's family, general, surgery, pediatrics, and gynecology departments. Her experiences ranged from witnessing the birth of babies to educating high-risk groups about HIV/AIDS prevention.
At PMI, patients don't pay for the medical staff's time, but they are required to buy their own supplies - even the gloves that doctors use while treating them - pricing many local residents out of receiving basic medical care.
Others need treatment but live a burdensome distance away, or can't afford to lose wages by spending hours waiting to be seen by a doctor.
Ostertag-Hill said that it was emotionally challenging to witness health care insecurity and abject poverty. But she was also impacted by doctors and other medical professionals who found creative ways to improve the dismal situation.
Born to a British father and German mother, Ostertag-Hill enjoys travel and hopes to work in Africa during medical school. She wants to become a pediatric surgeon. She also hopes to return to India and do medical outreaches in other developing nations.
As an undergraduate, Ostertag-Hill pursued a psychology degree because she loves studying how people think and believes it will help her become a more empathetic doctor.
Ostertag-Hill's honors thesis work focused on the bovine herpes virus and the human simplex virus. Her work on the bovine herpes virus was published in Virus Research, a peer-reviewed journal.
Ostertag-Hill has also researched pancreatic cancer at UCLA Medical School, and worked on another cancer study at the University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center.
This summer, Ostertag-Hill is doing a combination of research and shadowing at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.
She's working on a clinical research project about abdominal aortitis, or inflammation of the aorta. She will be writing a paper for publication with the goal of helping physicians treat this condition more effectively in the future.
She'll start medical school in the fall and has a personal reason for choosing OHSU: her family.
Ostertag-Hill says that she has, "a little sister who is only five," and she wants to be near her while she is growing up.
Leaving campus weeks ahead of graduation was a "weird way to end," her studies at OSU, but Ostertag-Hill doesn't see her time in Minneapolis as work. Rather, she said, it's a "celebration," of her undergraduate career.
Some people celebrate with cake or alcohol, others by trekking to Minnesota to study hearts.
-- Rachel Crowell
503-221-8011; @writesRCrowell