This January, GFS junior Zahara Brown split her Junior Project time across a few locations. Some days, she worked at Penn Medicine, shadowing a primary care and family medicine doctor. She also collaborated with the Perinatal Resources for Opioid Use Disorder (PROUD) team. PROUD is part of the Center for Addiction Medicine and Policy on the UPenn campus. There, physicians, pharmacists, and certified recovery specialists provide prenatal and postpartum care, and treatment for opioid use disorder in a compassionate and non-judgemental environment.

Additionally, Brown occasionally worked with Penn’s Community Medicine division at West Philadelphia High School. These combined experiences helped her explore the powerful intersections of medicine, community advocacy, and addiction treatment resources. She was also able to get acquainted with parts of West Philly and University City.

Read more about a day in the life of Brown’s Junior Project:
 

For my Junior Project, I worked at both West Philadelphia High School and Penn Medicine University City. Each day, I took the train to 30th Street Station, then rode the El to either 40th Street or 46th Street, depending on where I was headed that day.

This photo is inside an office at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where all the supplies for patients are stored. PROUD receives diaper shipments every week and provides mothers who have already delivered with packs of diapers and other essential supplies to take home.

I worked with PROUD during one of their group care sessions, where a guest speaker talked about Baby Safety and demonstrated how to swaddle.

Usually, I start the second half of my commute at the 46th Street subway station, taking the El from the Drexel station to West Philadelphia High School. Once I get there, I walk down Market Street to reach WPHS.

This is inside West Philadelphia High School, in front of the nursing suite, where the Penn clinic takes place. I was at WPHS three days a week from 1 to 4:30 p.m., helping check kids in to see the doctor.

On days when I was at the clinic with PROUD working on the website, I would sit in the nursing suite with my supervisor, looking up other organizations that operate similarly to PROUD and searching for resources to link on the website.