From AI to VR: Inside Cleveland Clinic’s Advanced Tech Internship

Podcast Transcript

Dr. James K. Stoller:

Hello, and welcome to MedEd Thread, a Cleveland Clinic Education Institute podcast that explores the latest innovations in medical education and amplifies the tremendous work of our educators across the enterprise. 

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Hello, welcome to today's episode of MedEd Thread, an Education Institute podcast exploring Cleveland Clinic's Advanced Technology Internship Program for high school students. I'm your host, Dr. Tony Tizzano, Director of Student and Learner Health here at Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, Ohio. Today, I'm very pleased to have Carlos Herrera, intern within our Center for Youth and College Education, here to join us. Carlos, welcome to the podcast.

Carlos Herrera:

Thank you so much for having me today.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Well, to get us started, Carlos, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your educational background, what brought you to Cleveland, and your role here at Cleveland Clinic?

Carlos Herrera:

Yeah, for sure. So, I'm an international student from El Salvador and I came here to do my undergrad studies, and I'm at TSU, I'm a senior doing computer science, and I'm also pursuing my Master's in computer science at TSU. So, you know, the idea of being here in Cleveland and being able to be part of all the changes in technology and healthcare, that's what brought me here to Cleveland.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

In today's segment, we will focus on how the Advanced Technology Internship Program offered by Cleveland Clinic's Center for Youth and College Education offers high school students a unique and inspiring opportunity to work together with the Clinic's world class researchers and acquire firsthand experience around high-performance computing and its cutting edge applications in healthcare research. So, Carlos, could you please help frame this topic by providing our listeners with an overview of this exciting and unique internship program?

Carlos Herrera:

Absolutely. So, the Center for Youth and College Education, uh, we can call CYCE, we offer this advanced technology program. It's a specialized track within our high school summer internship program. So, this is a paid internship where we provide high school students with engaging, real world experiences in high-performance computing, data science, graphic design, artificial intelligence, and many other different fields that we have here at the Clinic that we work with to provide the best experience that we can do to patients.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah. At the end of the day, th- its application to patients, you know, is our focus, but I have to say, for high school students, being able to see some of these modalities are probably the only place in the area where such a thing could happen. So, you mention high-performance computing, what is that and how does it differ from classical computing? In layman's terms, please.

Carlos Herrera:

Yeah, (laughs).

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

(laughs).

Carlos Herrera:

So, high-performance computing is... I would like to define it as using very powerful computers, [inaudible 00:03:03] use clusters of servers, to do a very specific task. So, pretty much you have all the resources from a computer being used for a very specific task. For instance, if you wanna do machine learning, you can train a model using a high-performance computer. And since you're allocating all the resources to just one task, it's gonna get done faster and probably better. So, you know, instead of you having to use your computer to do 1,000,000 things, you have one computer s- for a very specific task.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

And is it doing many things simultaneously then? Is it capable of that?

Carlos Herrera:

It is capable of, you know, doing many things at the same time, but the main focus is to do one specific task with all the resources. So, as I mentioned, if- if you wanna train, for instance, a machine learning model, you could put all the resources to just do that. You don't need to have a user interface, you don't need... Any other resource can be used for that specific task.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, for complex tasks, this could be done-

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

... much more quickly. Someone made the comparison that what would take a conventional computer 40 weeks could be done in four minutes.

Carlos Herrera:

Right.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Is that realistic to say that?

Carlos Herrera:

Yes, it depends on the problem-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

On the task.

Carlos Herrera:

... why, on the task, correct. But usually the time really gets cut off. You know, yo- you can do data processing in minutes or hours, something that would take days or months for a desktop computer, for instance. 

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, it could actually be a cost savings in some applications where complexity is there and it wa- and it was suitable. So, what are the goals of this internship and how did it come about?

Carlos Herrera:

So, last summer, 2024, we had our first cohort of students. We had 23 students and what we wanna do is, as I mentioned before, we wanna create this awareness that if you have the skills in technology, you can apply them to healthcare, and we wanna give our students in the Cleveland area and Northeast Ohio this, pretty much a unique experience, you know? You have the opportunity to be working on a real world setting and I think that's phenomenal. So, I would say that our main goal with this internship is to, for some, inspire, but for other people, who, you know- people who are real excited about technology, we wanna spark that interest. We wanna give them more fire, if that makes sense.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Sure, to accelerate their enthusiasm.

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, I hope that we have students among our listeners or perhaps their parents are listening, what are the prerequisites for this program and how do you get started?

Carlos Herrera:

So, the most important prerequisite is that you have to be enrolled in 9th to 12th grade, so that's a very important thing, you know, you have to be a high school student to be a p- a participant. Then you have to live and attend a school in Northeast Ohio, that's a must requirement, and must be at least 15-year-old by June 1st, 2025. So, besides that, be a US citizen, non-citizen national, or legal permanent residence, and in terms of academics, you only need a 2.5 or better on a scale f- 4.0. And the last thing that I think is very important is have a strong interest in clinical and nonclinical healthcare careers, because we wanna have students who see themself in the future working, m- maybe not exactly for the Cleveland Clinic, but in healthcare, trying to promote using technology to improve healthcare.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Excellent. Well, the Clinic is certainly committed to these students, and I understand that also you're expected to be able to attend the entire program from-

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

... beginning to end, which is important and I think that it's kind of a quid pro quo, but it's great. So, once you're accepted into the program, what are some of the specific expectations that you might expect to receive?

Carlos Herrera:

So, as a student, when you're accepted as an intern, you pretty much become a- a caregiver. So, you're expected to be here Monday through Friday, but we get a different time 'cause, you know, Ohio laws for minors, so you will be working 9:00 to 3:30 PM every day and it's gonna be a seven-week program. And as I mentioned, it will be a paid internship, it's a very competitive salary, $15 an hour, for high school students, for some of them, might be the- the first job that they might have, as well as you will get soft skills and professional development training.

We have a partnership with ELA, so that's the Effective L- Leadership Academy, that they train our students to be prepared for the job or prepared for a real world experience, (laughs), you know-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

How to present-

Carlos Herrera:

... having to send emails, having to present-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yes.

Carlos Herrera:

... correct. As well as, you know, we do hybrid and onsite locations, we had three students from Akron this past summer, we had students in different locations all over Northeast Ohio.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, this is outstanding, and so some of these tutorials or- or professional development programs are the very same thing that our other caregivers that work here are getting.

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yeah, that's outstanding, so there's probably even an opportunity to network perhaps with some of these individuals as you meet them.

Carlos Herrera:

Yes.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, students do then get to participate in Cleveland Clinic professional development activities and the same workshops that are offered to researchers. What does some of that look like.

Carlos Herrera:

Yes, so the workshops that we have, they are designed to help participants learn from the experiences and insights of other professionals from different fields and industries. So, we have activities such as leadership development, we have tours to different data centers or labs from the clinic. So, for instance, this past summer we had a tour to the Simulation Center and our students were really amazed to see the things that we have here. We saw a C-section, we saw when you get injured, what to do, those were really interesting things to, you know- to show to our students.

And as well we also had panel discussions with college interns, as I mentioned last time that I was here, we have our Discovery Accelerator in- internship, and this happens at the same time but with college students, so they have the opportunity to discuss with college students. And I really like this opportunity that they had this past summer because some of them, they still don't know what they wanna do in college. And seeing other students who struggle, I don't know, one or two years before them, it's really interesting to see their interactions.

And lastly, w- they- they also have the opportunity to do the Quantum Computing Journey, this is a learning opportunity to learn about quantum computing and that's offered in partnership with IBM, so we have those resources for them.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, that's wonderful, you know, innovation is one of the drivers of Cleveland Clinic and, you know, to be able to see this cutting edge sort of work being done has to be fascinating. And the Sim Center, the Simulation Center, you know, it's as close as you can get to the real thing, and it's important-

Carlos Herrera:

Right.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

... because it's not just to practice but it's to make sure that you can keep skills that are rarely used or seldom used at peak performance. So, what are examples of some of the experiences or perhaps placements within the Advanced Technology Track program that allow students to expand their horizons in specialized computational science and technology?

Carlos Herrera:

When a student is filling out the application to be part of this internship, they will see many different specialized tracks that we have on the form. And I will list some of them and I will tell you perhaps a little bit about what our students did. So, the most requested one, artificial intelligence, AI, we had students work with machine learning models, learning how to train models for... One of them, uh, was doing something for a cardiology lab, so that was very interesting.

We had coding in general, you know, they had to code a website, a form to be connected to a database, and that brings me to the next topic, that was database development or management. We have tons of data here at the Clinic and some of our interns had the opportunity to work with the managers of, you know, the databases. That's really huge. We also had graphic design, one of our interns even designed the handbook of our programs, so, you know, that really helped us. 

And as you can see, you're not given, you know, quote, unquote, 'busy work,' you're given real work that will be used in the future or will be used right away. We have information technology, cybersecurity, IT help desk, virtual reality, augmented reality, and biomedical engineering, those are some of the fields that we have for our internship program.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, very broad opportunities. You mentioned virtual reality and augmented reality, wha- what are the differences between the two?

Carlos Herrera:

I like this question because, uh, as I mentioned, we went to the Simulation Center, right? And there, we had three interns who were working v- virtual reality. So, virtual reality is when you have lenses and you them in- in your eyes, and you're only seeing the virtual background, if that makes sense, and then for augmented reality, you immerse reality with technology. So, for instance, if you have some lenses and you can see, let's say, a picture on your desk that's not there but with the lenses you can see it, that's immersing. You have augmented the reality, that's what I would like to de-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, you're adding something?

Carlos Herrera:

Correct, otherwise you're part of the virtual environment, for virtual reality. So, at the Simulation Center, for instance, we have both things and augmented reality is usually used for training medical students when they have to do a surgery. If you don't wanna, (laughs), open a patient, you [inaudible 00:13:51] them a patient and you can interact with that system, so that's-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Incredible.

Carlos Herrera:

... that's incredible, correct. 

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

I bet they enjoy doing that. Carlos, what has the student feedback and takeaways been like, uh, from the first year's cohort? And when you did this, what surprised you most, from your experience?

Carlos Herrera:

Our feedback from our students has been incredibly positive, since they mentioned that they have a, you know- a better sense of what they wanna do in the future and what they don't like. So, I personally mentioned this to them during the first two weeks of the program, that this, it's an opportunity for them to learn what are the things that they can do and what are the things that they like, that they don't like, and what are the things that they would like to learn more about?

Because at the end of the day, this is not a full-time position, this is a learning experience for our students. So, they get to see many different things, they get to network with different caregivers, different interns, and it's really wonderful to see how they, even in a seven-week program, they come in as a person and they go out as a v- whole different person, that's really wonderful to see.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, a transformation right before your eyes. You know, I have to think too that, you know, as one is picking courses to take in high school and what have you and you have one of these experiences, it might tailor your selections-

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

... to give you some of the prerequisites you may need down the road. And then you can take another one-

Carlos Herrera:

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

... hopefully, the next year, that maybe closely homes in on something that you thought you might like and- and if you find out you don't, w- I think it's just as important. Education's expensive and if you get to the point where you're gonna start a college program, you're laying down significant money and there's probably some debt involved.

Carlos Herrera:

Yeah.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

So, both decisions are important. So, fantastic, how do we get started if you're interested? What do you do?

Carlos Herrera:

So, you can contact us through our website, if you search the Center for Youth and College Education, it will be, you know, like, the first or second option, and you can find our contact information in there. You can email us if you have any questions. And right now you can get started by doing your resume, your personal statement, and making sure you look at the different options that we mentioned here, artificial intelligence, data science, graphic design, website development, virtual reality. Think about what you wanna be, uh, working on during the summer and try to make your personal statement as close as possible to let us know why you should be part of this program.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Excellent, excellent. To our listeners, I hope you take advantage of such an opportunity. As you look at the future, Carlos, what do you hope lies on the horizon for this sort of internship program?

Carlos Herrera:

So, we hope to host more students. We wanna be the pipeline for Northeast Ohio, we wanna be the ones who prepare students from 9th to 12th grade, the next generation caregivers, top tier researchers in the future, you know, students who will be able to use artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and many different other cutting-edge technologies, apply to research and healthcare. That's what we wanna do, we wanna cultivate the- the experience for these high school students.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Sparking that interest is so important. Do you think as it grows in popularity, you'll expand the capacity of the program?

Carlos Herrera:

Yes. So, we're trying to expand our program, it's- it's been a little bit difficult since COVID, you know, th- our numbers-

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Yes.

Carlos Herrera:

... have gone down. But for the future, we expect to have more students. And I can tell you, from this past cohort, we had students who were incredible. Each one of them had so much experience in technology that sometimes we- you know, we didn't have enough things t- for them to do. We had them still five days a week and they were asking for more tasks, and that's incredible, you know? Seeing them, how they can do incredible things with technology, it's wonderful to see.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

It's super. Are there any questions that I should've asked that you'd like to comment on or feel are important for our listeners to know? Or did we cover it all?

Carlos Herrera:

I think we covered it all, but last thing that I would like to mention is please, this is for- for the students, even if you're in- unsure that you wanna do an engineering or technology related major in- in college, please make sure you apply and get that experience.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Nothing like getting experience and it's hard to get without having the job, so here's a f- fabulous opportunity.

Carlos Herrera:

Correct.

Dr. Tony Tizzano:

Well, thank you so much, Carlos, this has been a wonderful and insightful episode of MedEd Thread. To our listeners, if you'd like to suggest a medical education topic to us or comment on an episode, please email us at education@ccf.org. Thank you very much for joining and we look forward to seeing you on our next podcast, have a wonderful day.

Dr. James K. Stoller:

This concludes this episode of MedEd Thread, a Cleveland Clinic Education Institute podcast. Be sure to subscribe to hear new episodes via iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, thanks for listening to MedEd Thread and please join us again soon.