Rain DeLucia ’23 traveled to Genoa, Italy to further her education in medicine by shadowing doctors and attending lectures hosted by Italian health professionals for two weeks this past August.

DeLucia, a biochemistry major, was able to gain valuable experience and insight into the medical field while exploring Genoa and surrounding Italy. 

After applying for the program in February, undergoing an interview process and being accepted in April, DeLucia was notified she would be shadowing professionals at Galliera Hospital in Genoa, which was built in 1877 by the Duchess of Genoa with a capacity of 450 beds. 

“I was pre-med, and I wanted to be a doctor and needed shadowing hours,” DeLucia said. “I always wanted to go to Italy, and it seemed like a great way to do both. The two-week program guaranteed 40 hours of experience shadowing professionals as well as weekly trips on Friday aimed at allowing students to explore surrounding Italy. Genoa attracted students from all over the world due to its less urban setting than that of Rome or Milan, where the program is hosted in addition to Genoa.”

DeLucia spoke of how the program changed her understanding of the career she wanted to pursue upon graduation in May, saying that the program unexpectedly exposed her to the cultural differences in medicine, most notably the emphasis placed on preventative medicine in primarily socialist countries such as Italy. 

“Italian doctors seem especially invested in patient care and preventative measures. Dr. Picciotto, a doctor whose lecture we listened to, gives his patients his personal phone numbers in order to be easily accessible to all of his patients,” DeLucia said. “I admired how he has dedicated his life to medicine and being a doctor.”

“I realized after the program that I was more interested in conducting research in order to study bioactive in food and how it can affect our health,” DeLucia said. “It deterred me from being a physician because I want to be more involved in preventative medicine, and research will intersect more directly with this interest.”

Despite DeLucia making the decision to change the path of her future career, she maintains that the experience was educational in many veins, including both medical and cultural. 

“I got to be in the operating room, and I was a few feet away from the surgeon that was operating,” DeLucia said. “The patient was a man they were doing a double surgery on to remove his jaw, which was filled with cancer, while also removing part of his tibia to replace the jawbone they had just removed. I was in there for about three hours, but the surgery itself lasted about eight hours.”

DeLucia also had experience in other sectors of the hospital, including geriatrics, orthopedic surgery and anesthesiology. She believes the most difficult part of the program was the language barrier that existed between doctors and students, as the program had indicated that proficiency in Italian was not a requirement for admission. 

At the end of each day, the students had free time after returning home from the hospital to explore Genoa. The city is on the coast, making the beaches and surrounding city streets popular with students and tourists, as well as its notable cuisine. 

DeLucia plans to take a gap year following graduation in order to apply for AmeriCorps positions as well as Ph.D. programs, which will help propel her toward a career in food science. 

“After doing the Doctors in Italy program, in the future, I definitely think it would be interesting to work in another country and work more cohesively with patients,” DeLucia said.