Mekky Media Relations Jeremy Marks, a University of Iowa graduate, is shown in South Africa last summer. Marks is a finalist for this year’s Global Citizen of the Year award from his abroad internship program for his work in a Cape Town hospital system.
By Madison Arnold, The Gazette
IOWA CITY — Jeremy Marks still keeps in contact with his co-workers from his internships abroad in Cape Town, Beijing and Shanghai last summer.
Thanks to that communication, Marks, a 2018 University of Iowa graduate, said he knows the hospital programs he developed while working in those cities are still in use today. Marks’ projects, particularly a medical equipment registry for the New Somerset Hospital system, earned him finalist status for the 2018 Global Citizen of the Year award from the internship program IES Abroad.
“If you imagine all the equipment that goes through a hospital, you would think there’d be some sort of inventory of it,” Marks said. “When I got there really was no method of keeping track of where everything was. So a surgeon was going to be doing a procedure and they’d need a scalpel ... the scalpel wouldn’t be there.”
The Global person of the Year award is reserved for students who show a “significant impact through philanthropic, academic, or personal efforts,” according to a media release.