THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

I appreciate very much your invitation to bring to the readers of Pediatrics information about summer assignments in the Public Health Service, the qualifications required and the results that may be anticipated from a few months' experience with our Service. For more than four years, now, the Public Health Service has made available summer employment to a limited number of students in medical, engineering, and basic science professions. The practice has proved beneficial to the Service in providing assistance to selected public health clinical and research projects. It also has offered actual working experience in a supervised environment for students in the medical and allied scientific fields. Many students and a number of deans have expressed appreciation of the opportunities which summer employment has contributed to the professional training and development of the students. Our reason for initiating the summer program has been twofold. We need the temporary assistance of competent students in many of our operating and research programs and we want more students to become acquainted with the reasons for the conduct of public health activities. Students selected for these assignments receive civil service appointments which begin at the close of the academic year and terminate early in September. The salary is $284 a month. These summer assignments cover a wide area of Public Health Service activity. They range from laboratory research projects at the National Institutes of Health to investigations of communicable disease problems at the Communicable Disease Center; from clinical assistant posts in venereal disease clinics to assistant-ships in our psychiatric hospital; from studies of industrial plant hazards to epidemiological investigations of psittacosis.