How Inspiring Minds students get connected with paid internships at Mercy Health
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Inspiring Minds links students to paid internships at Mercy Health hospitals.
- Interns gain career exposure, mentorship, and early experience in healthcare.
- The program encourages students to return and serve their home communities.
Since 2018, Youngstown’s Mercy Health and Inspiring Minds have been connecting students with paid, hands-on internships in healthcare that lead to fulfilling careers.
As a middle school student, Choniece Phillips started at Inspiring Minds in Youngstown, a youth enrichment organization serving 700 students a year.
“I continued through high school. We had a lot of opportunities and college visits,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do healthcare, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.”
Inspring Minds connects students to meaningful careers “the right way”
With early career development at Inspiring Minds, Phillips said she was able to figure out that pharmacy was what she wanted to do.
“Inspiring Minds really helped me to be able to go down the path to get there the right way,” Phillips said. “Within the community, I was able to shadow other pharmacists, and one of the pharmacists in Warren took me to her college and I had a personal tour.”
A proud graduate of Duquesne University, Phillips now has worked as a pharmacist at Mercy Health’s St. Elizabeth in Youngstown for over a year, thanks to the early career development with Inspiring Minds.
“I really wanted to help the [Mahoning Valley] community and be within my community working and helping so it was nice coming home,” Phillips said.
She said she’s able to understand some of the potential struggles or barriers holding her patients back as someone who’s lived here.
“I advocate for my patients and see the different things that they’re going through, not just whatever disease state that they have,” Phillips said. “You have to see the whole person. It helps coming from the community and working in the community knowing what they’re going through.”
Fellow pharmacist Matthew Tricomi works with Phillips at Mercy Health.
“We feel super fortunate to be able to have her come back and be part of the team,” Tricomi said. “She’s made such a big difference since she joined and all that hard work definitely paid off. She’s doing a great job.”
Phillips said the biggest thing she took from Inspiring Minds was stepping outside of her comfort zone and a sense of community in her city.
How did the program with Inspiring Minds and Mercy Health start?
The Inspiring Minds Summer Career Development Program started in 2018 to connect seniors with internships after graduation close to home.
Jalaya Provitt is a graduate of Inspiring Minds and coordinates the organization’s high school programming.
“We wanted to show our graduating seniors that it was possible to have a paid internship and also still have opportunities in the Mahoning Valley,” Provitt said.
Provitt said students would tell IM what they were interested in post high school, then get paired with local businesses and partners for their internships.
“Our partnership with Mercy Health has had a lot of success,” she said. “We started that in 2019. It’s mutually-beneficial. The goal is for them to go out, spread their wings and then eventually come home, back to the Mahoning Valley.”
Angie Massacci is the director of perioperative services at St. Joseph Warren Hospital.
She coordinates the IM summer internships program on Mercy Health’s side.
“We partnered with the Mercy Health Foundation for grants so that we could have the funds to pay the students,” Massacci said. “Then we developed a program where we usually hire two students that come in the summer. It’s for anyone that’s interested in health care.”
Interns are placed in hospital waiting rooms, serving the community and exposed to real patient care under supervision from mentors, according to Massacci.
“It helps build confidence and exposes them to the work experience,” she said. “A lot of them are from under privileged areas, so they don’t always get to see that culturally diverse work place. It gives them that confidence that they need to continue their education. Our team really does a great job of really embracing them, teaching them and encouraging them.”
At the end of the IM summer career development program, Provitt said they’ll usually have a close out ceremony to celebrate the students.
“To be back and to give to your community, the same people that gave to you, is very important. You appreciate it more and you have more pride in your community and your work,” Provitt said. “We have two that will be at Mercy Health and they were actually there last year as well. It’s been very beneficial for them to be placed at Mercy.”
This year, she said the end-of-year event will be more similar to a college fair.
“People can actually just kind of walk around tables set up where they’ll be able to see what the internship was like,” she said.
Learn more online about Inspiring Minds and founder Deryck Toles whose mission is to show that “anything’s possible.”
