Imogen's Internship Experience with Public Policy|Southampton (PPS)

04 August 2024

Imogen Shaw

I spent 4 weeks this summer working as an intern for the Public Policy|Southampton Team. After an email about an opportunity to gain experience in health policy caught my eye, I applied just after my penultimate year exams, and hoped for the best! When I received the email with the good news, after the initial excitement and disbelief, suddenly I was overcome with nerves. After all, I had limited experience with public policy, and was worried passion and interest would not be enough to make up for the deficit…

However, I needn’t have worried. The first day of the internship, the other two interns and myself started off with a virtual meeting of the team. Everyone was welcoming, incredibly approachable, and happy to have us on board. We were then gently inducted into the world of policy, and talks and meetings were arranged to give us a basic understanding of the processes that govern it. We were also given access to previous lectures that the team thought may be useful to our learning.

After our introduction to the basics, us interns were then assigned our topics. It was evident that a lot of thought had been put into this – each person was given a project that appealed to their strengths and interests (as we had written about in our applications). From then on, it was time to get started!

I think the biggest lesson I learnt was that no avenue you discover in policy is a waste of time. Initially, I found it difficult to work towards my project – mapping stakeholders in health disparities for Scotland and Wales – as I quickly realised that the resources I was used to working with in medical research are very different to literature searching in policy. However, even though I felt in the beginning that I was entering down rabbit-holes, the more I learned, the quicker and easier I found any subsequent work. Therefore, from an initial amorphous mess, an overall shape and approach to my project started to appear.

So, that’s how I found myself spending my July reading through minutes from health and social care committee meetings in the Senedd and Holyrood. I looked at upcoming policy, current drafts being debated, and major reports that have been published in recent years, then compiled them together and organised them by nation and type of stakeholder. By the end of the month, I had (what I hoped) was a comprehensive excel sheet detailing the names and contact numbers of stakeholders in health inequalities for Scotland and Wales, and a document containing the names and a brief summary of the most pertinent documents related to the theme.

I enjoyed the amount of freedom the role allowed us to have. Our project briefs were exactly that – brief, which allowed us to develop them as we saw fit and learned throughout the month. The readiness of the team to support us in our work was also a welcome surprise, as was the flexibility and time commitment. This has meant that alongside this being a fantastic opportunity to work and learn in health policy, I was also able to decompress before embarking on my final year of medicine.

If this internship were repeated next year (and if it were, I would encourage anyone with an interest to apply!) a point of development might be ensuring that the initial induction day is in person. I appreciate that online is more accessible, but I find that in-person inductions are preferable when teaching content that is completely new – aka policy! I also think a flipside to the freedom given with the project is that it may be difficult to find a direction.

Overall, I found my internship to be an incredible opportunity that has stoked my interest in health policy. The team have been welcoming throughout, and great at introducing us to completely new content in a user-friendly way. I can only hope that my project work is as useful in the future of PP|S as my internship experience has been to mine.

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