As an intern at the Medical Examiner's Office, you have to be prepared to deal with death and disturbing situations.

Think clearly about this before making your decision to intern as an autopsy technician intern. I've seen plenty of people come in to view autopsies during my short time there that thought they could handle it and obviously couldn't! You will be around dead bodies all day long. You will see blood and internal organs and bits of tissue everywhere. You will get covered in it.

The smell is as bad as you could imagine. When you cut open a decomposed body, the smell is indescribably horrible. You will get the smell everywhere: on your clothes, in your hair, and it will linger in your nose long after you have left for the day. Sometimes out of nowhere, at ten at night – after you've showered and put on new clothes and you're lying in bed reading or watching the nightly news, the smell will all of a sudden creep up on you and suddenly it's all you can smell or think about.

You will see traumatic death situations. You will see the myriad ways a human body can be mangled, broken, traumatized or infected. You will also see the often gruesome and emotionally draining end results of the horrible things people do to each other. Some cases will slip out of your mind by lunchtime; some will stay with you for the rest of your life. I was assigned a child abuse case on my second day that brought me to tears and still haunts me to this day. What you have to remember though, is that everything you do as an autopsy technician will help bring peace and closure to the decedents' families, or may even help put a murderer behind bars. Undoubtedly, you will encounter disturbing images or situations you will never forget.

You will be exposed to dangerous situations as well. Viral and bacterial infections are a real threat. Universal precautions will be taken, but they aren't 100% effective. Nothing is. On my last day, I pricked my finger with a needle while sewing up a body infected with Hepatitis C. The chances of infection are pretty low, but I still have to deal with the possibility of being infected with an incurable disease for six months before I know that I am OK.

The work is hard. It's mentally taxing, often emotionally grueling, and physically exhausting. You'll be on your feet all day long, starting early in the morning. You'll have to move heavy bodies and make spur-of-the-moment, time-sensitive runs to the hospital to deliver samples to the microbiology lab. You will be questioned at length about anatomy and physiology by the medical examiners about things that you have never even thought about, and you'll be told that things you thought were right are in fact very, very wrong. You'll forget where things are and how to organize paperwork and sometimes you will feel like there is too much to learn.

But, for every thing about it that's difficult, there are a million rewarding reasons to participate. This internship gives you the best crash course in anatomy you will ever receive as an undergraduate! You may have taken anatomy and even done the cadaver lab, but nothing quite compares to seeing the human body during an autopsy. You will learn more about human biology in one semester than you probably have ever learned thus far in your life. You'll discover incredible things about anatomy, physiology, chemistry, microbiology, pathology and medicine every day. You'll get to work with a great group of people that you'll hopefully remain friends with for years to come. You'll develop a pretty thick skin, and likely, a demented sense of humor! You will feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you finish a particularly busy day. And you will be that much more prepared for whatever path you choose to take through biological sciences in the future. Make no mistake, this is a tough internship. You're not going to get any downtime here, no coffee runs, no internet surfing. But it is fun, and fascinating, and just a really incredible experience.