Imagining the Future with Emylie Lentzner, Intern with a Social Conscience and Content Creator

Emylie is currently in her 7th year of medical school at Université Paris Cité and an intern in Psychiatry at the Hôpital du Clos Bernard. She is a member of a young caregiver collective and regularly holds open mic events for students and health workers. A closer look at her career and aspirations.

Promoting Mutual Aid and Well-Being Is a Vocation

Emylie quickly took an interest in student life. In her second year of medical school, she got involved in Université Paris Cité’s community life by becoming the student Vice-President.

She then focused on medical students: « Being a student in healthcare is not without significance. You spend a lot of time at the hospital, doing coursework and in contact with people who are ill. Naturally, this has an impact on how you build your adult life. And yet there are few places where you can talk about your experiences. When I was studying, I saw a lot of students questioning their future, their speciality, their relationship with medicine, and being left alone with their doubts. Studying Medicine was not easy for me. I felt like I was cramming all the time, which made no sense,” says Emylie.

Creating a Place Where Students and Healthcare Workers Can Talk

This is why Emylie set up an association called Derrière le Blouse (under the white coat) in her 3rd year, with her friend Kendrys Legenty. Together, they produced film portraits of enthusiastic caregivers they would not have had the opportunity to meet during their internships.

During the Covid-19 public health crisis, she also produced the podcast: “Stories of young caregivers in times of crisis”, when she was a nurse herself. “We felt that mainstream media coverage was overrun with the same people and we wanted to highlight the students and healthcare workers on the front line. We wanted to preserve what they had to say, so that it could be passed on to future generations.”

By launching the Fabrique des Soignants programme on Twitch with her group, she now hopes to showcase enthusiastic, motivated professionals who can share their views and reassure healthcare students. “We talk about orientation, the place of a young caregiver in the hospital world, but also about the health system, the vocation, and innovation in care, and so on.”

A Schedule Matching her Ambitions

She shares her time between her courses, hospital work and content creation for a variety of media.
“I’ve always been accustomed to doing lots of things as well as medicine, but it’s quite challenging. I try to maintain a good healthy lifestyle and I continue to do as much sport as I can. Normally, as an intern, we should have a half-day every week to work on our private projects, but, unfortunately, this is not always possible. […] For me, being a doctor really means being at the heart of society; you’re there for everyone, whatever their social class, profession or age. So, we’re at the forefront when it comes to economic, political, social and environmental crises, and we have a role to play and things to say.”

Emylie intends to continue to combine medicine, journalism and public health initiatives in the future. We wish her success in all the projects she undertakes.