“[My internship] not only helped to solidify that I do want to be a doctor, but it also allowed me to see the kind of doctor I want to be.”
From the Operating Room to the Baseball Diamond
Like many students, Liam Selvido, C’25, sought to make the most of his summer by pursuing an internship. Unlike many students, Selvido didn’t stop at just one.
By day, he interned at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, working in the clinic’s Clinical Genomics Department, where he engaged in detailed research, shadowed doctors, and got an up-close look at how some of the world’s rarest diseases can be treated. At night, he traveled across town and joined the media pool as a team photographer for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp (the Triple-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins) baseball team’s home games.
The two experiences did not have much in common, but that was nothing new for Selvido. A student-athlete (tennis), musician (bassist in the Sewanee Symphony Orchestra), student researcher (studying centipede genetics in a Sewanee lab), and freelance photographer, he’s used to making connections across disparate areas and interests.
That experience served him well as he navigated his two worlds. A typical day at the Mayo Clinic involved a deep dive into the existing literature on a given disease. His unit within the Mayo Clinic investigated only extremely rare cases, looking for connections between a patient’s genetics and the specific presentation of their condition. One of Selvido’s cases involved a patient who was just the second person in the entire world with a certain disease presentation, owing to just a single nucleotide mutation.
When not reviewing literature or writing up his research, Selvido also had the chance to observe other areas at the Mayo Clinic. On one unforgettable day, he witnessed a cardiothoracic surgical operation—performed by robots.
Many evenings, Selvido would then find himself in an entirely different environment: the dugout of a professional baseball team. Already an experienced sports photographer, he found his skills pushed to the next level as he adjusted to the quicker pace and demands of pro sports. Whereas he would normally spend over an hour editing photos after an event, he suddenly found himself having to edit as he went—and in the span of just minutes would go from capturing an image to seeing it shared on the team’s social media accounts. “I learned a lot about being ready,” says Selvido.
That need to be ready for anything was something that held constant across his two internships. Whether encountering rare disease presentations at the hospital or watching the on-field action through his camera’s viewfinder, Selvido had to be ready to respond to any unexpected developments.
Though Selvido doesn’t imagine that his post-Sewanee working days will look exactly the same as they did this summer—“I’m not sure that medical school all day and photography at night are the most compatible,” he says—his time at the Mayo Clinic helped to crystallize how he hopes to approach his future work.
“I saw some of the most in-depth, patient-centered care in the world,” says Selvido. “It not only helped to solidify that I do want to be a doctor, but it also allowed me to see the kind of doctor I want to be.”
