Through my involvement in the Miss America Organization, I have worked closely with the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals since 2015. During the Spring semester of my Junior year of college, I was able to take my involvement one step further and intern at Seacrest Studios located in the main lobby of Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, NC.

Seacrest Studios was founded by The Ryan Seacrest Foundation in hopes to inspire todays youth through entertainment and provide children’s hospital patients an escape from their daily routine. The studio is stocked with fun games and toy prizes and provides daily programs that the patients can participate in. Patients are welcomed to enter the studio at any time, but also are able to stream the live programming from their rooms through a private channel exclusive to the children’s hospital. As an intern, we were required to create and execute shows twice a week as a part of the scheduled programming. These shows were geared to entertain and allow for active participation from within the studio or via patients rooms. For my shows, I created a trivia and music program that allowed for patients to win prizes while educating them about certain topics. I also had a second show co-hosted with another intern, Grace. We focused on lifestyle and current events within entertainment news geared for tweens and teens within the children’s hospital. Grace and I also hosted bingo prize tournaments every Wednesday which was a major hit with the patients!

Through this internship I got to see the day to day operations of a children’s hospital and see the Children’s Miracle Network Foundation through a new lens. I realized that although I was able to leave every day after my shift, these patients and their families were constantly confined to the walls of the hospital. After my internship, I kept in touch with my internship coordinators and saw that the same patients I worked with in the Spring were still patients come the Fall semester. For these patients, this hospital was their home. They didn’t get to leave or have summer break, they had to continue fighting every day. This internship changed my entire perspective on the importance of children’s hospitals and since then I have continued to support and advocate for these children as they are unable to do so for themselves.