In “Where Are They Now,” we catch up with former ILA staff who are continuing to make a difference in the lives of others.
Gaelle Antoine has come a long way from when she was a 17-year-old senior at Brooklyn’s John Dewey High School and began interning at ILA. She was a member of the school’s co-op program for students who met their high school requirements before graduation.
“As a co-op student, I alternated between one week of school and one week of work at ILA,” Gaelle recalls. “I had the opportunity to assist any department in need at the Agency.” Her responsibilities included overseeing interdepartmental mail delivery, organizing files, and many other clerical tasks.
When Gaelle entered college, she continued to work part time at ILA as an assistant in Accounts Payable, helping to maintain records of invoices, payments, and other transactions. She also assisted in preparing invoices, purchase orders, and petty cash reports, and helped update the invoice monitoring systems.
Working at ILA enabled Gaelle to “understand the value of communication, teamwork, and most of all responsibility,” she points out. Each is a mark of a great physician—an outstanding career goal she is working toward at The Brooklyn Hospital Center as a fourth-year medical student from St. George’s University School of Medicine.
“My studies have entailed a basic science component to understand the fundamentals of medicine, as well as a clinical component in which I learn to incorporate these fundamental elements into clinical practice,” she explains.
Gaelle is striving for an anesthesiology residency and hopes to pursue two fellowships in critical care medicine and pain management. “Working as the head of a critical care unit in a hospital would be a dream come true,” she says.
As Gaelle reaches for the pinnacle of her profession, ILA remains close to her heart. “ILA has become part of my family. I make it a necessity to visit at least once a year. It feels as if I have never left,” Gaelle says. “The Agency has grown stronger than ever.”
For any intern following in her path at York Street, she advises, “Life is what you make it, so make the most of your time at ILA!”
