My day begins to the sweet sound of a power drill blasting through my window. I groggily reach for my phone, realizing that I have another 2 hours to drift in and out of sleep. Just as that thought has begun to surface, an alarm goes off in the distance. The nature of this daily, mysterious alarm has become a long-going argument between my suitemates and I. I try to ignore it and fall back asleep. This is the only downside of living in one of the most requested spots in Tel Aviv, the corner of Allenby and Rothschild.
At 8:40, my third alarm goes off. In the following half hour I manage to cook a few eggs, get dressed for work, pack my stuff and make it out the door. Not before grabbing my best friend, Dorian, of course, who also happens to be my coworker. I’m about to pull out my phone to check Moovit - the saving grace of every international intern in Israel- but it suddenly dawns on me that I don’t need it. This might just be my proudest accomplishment of summer.
The summer air is beautiful anyways. We get on the bus and hand the bus driver our Rav Kavs cards. Around 20 minutes later, we get off at the London Ministore stop, conveniently placed right by Sarona, Azrieli and many other attractions. Now comes the time for our second challenge of the day: dodging the electric bikes rapidly coming from both sides at the bus stop. We jokingly high-five after having survived the walk through the bike path yet another day and stroll into our workplace.
We work for CardioVia, a medical device startup. Together with two bosses, an engineer, multiple engineering firms, and two doctors, we work on engineering a device that will provide physicians with a minimally invasive access method into the outer surface of the heart through the pericardium. This not only increases the efficacy and safety of current common epicardial procedures, but also opens up the possibility for taking an epicardial approach to current endocardial procedures, increasing the level of safety and accessibility of this care tremendously.
When I first heard I was going to have a summer internship, I couldn’t help but be a bit underwhelmed. In America, internships have the connotation of being a concoction of busy work consisting of copy- pasting and making coffee for the “real workers”. Simply a stepping stone one has to endure in order to get to the “real stuff”.
To my surprise though, I had way more in store for me than I had ever imagined. During my time at CardioVia, I have been treated nothing short of a real employee at the company. On my first day here, my bosses told me they want nothing more than for me to have a fun yet meaningful experience here, and I cannot think of a more accurate way to describe what the nature of this program has been for me. Meaningful and fun.
We spend our days at work doing “the real stuff” as they’d call it in America. We look on databases upon databases for relevant clinical studies, discuss engineering ideas (and even attend engineering brainstorming meetings!), do market research, look over the company’s social media platforms and much more. I’m sure I don’t only speak for myself when I say that the work I have been doing in the company is not only significant but extremely appreciated.
And you know what the best part of an Israeli internship is? The employers understand that not only are you there to work, at the end of the day we are waved off with a smile and a “see you tomorrow!” as we are left to explore Tel Aviv. The possibilities are endless.
We take the bus back to the shuk and walk through it with our heads high. By now, we know this place inside and out. We are proud to be dining with locals. And after going through the shuk, sometimes not even buying anything at all, we spend our afternoon at the beach soaking up the summer sun. If someone told me a year ago that this is the summer I would be having, I wouldn’t believe them. But now, that I’m here, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Truly, this summer is one for the books.