Summer Medical Laboratory Immersion Internship
By Anastazia Hartman | October 2This summer, the Department of Pathology piloted a Summer Medical Laboratory Immersion Internship with two undergraduate students. The six-week full-time paid internship featured an opportunity for U-M students to work alongside medical laboratory professionals in the Diagnostic Genetics and Genomics laboratory and spend a few mornings shadowing in other labs, including Microbiology, Core Microbiology, Core Hematology, Core Chemistry/Mass Spec, Anatomic Pathology, HLA/Flow cytometry, FISH, and Blood Bank. Thank you to everyone who precepted the interns, especially Kristin LeSueur, who supervised them.
"The 2025 summer interns were a great addition to our lab this summer," said LeSueur. "They were driven to learn and worked well together and independently. It was a pleasure to be involved in undergraduate education and get a chance to possibly inspire students to pick this as their future career."
The purpose of this internship is to raise awareness of medical laboratory professions and appreciation for the contributions that the medical laboratory makes to patient care. Interns have responsibilities of a Laboratory Technician, supporting laboratory tasks that may include pre-analytic processing, centrifugation, aliquoting, instrument preparation and loading, and administrative tasks using the hospital and lab information systems. They gain real-world experience and contribute to production while immersed in the medical laboratory culture.
“College students approach me all of the time asking about summer internships, and this program gives us a mechanism to bring them into our world. Whether they pursue a medical laboratory profession or some other healthcare career, the experience shapes their view,” said Karen Barron, Allied Health Education Manager.
The program is aimed at undergrads interested in science and healthcare, and they must have completed some biology, chemistry, and math courses before the internship. The pilot interns were Iris Chu, a rising Junior majoring in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Preston Lottie, a rising Junior majoring in Microbiology. They received certificates upon completion of the internship.
“I just wanted to say thank you for accepting me as an intern for Michigan Medicine Pathology! The past six weeks have been an amazing growth opportunity for me, allowing me to shadow different labs as well as gain exposure to clinical career pathways. I really appreciate the time and effort spent creating this new undergrad summer internship, and I hope it flourishes next summer. I am positive that my fellow undergrad peers would be ecstatic for an opportunity like this, just as I was,“ said Chu.
We would like to expand upon the internship next summer and are currently forming a committee to plan for it. Please contact Karen Barron, Pathology Allied Health Education Manager, if your lab would like to explore participating in the summer of 2026.
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