Resume Typo Results in Student's Summer Job as Internist

The medical community was startled to learn last week that due to a simple error in the "Objective" section of his resumé, mechanical engineering junior Ryan Pakes has been working at Cook County Hospital in Chicago as a practitioner of internal medicine since early May.

The resumé, which describes Pakes as seeking "a challenging and rewarding position as a summer internist in your fantastic cutting edge company," was apparently submitted to the hospital by mistake. Pakes, who has now returned to school, was immediately relieved of his position when the error was discovered.

"We're not too sure how it happened," says hospital spokesperson Janet Givens, "but it's understandable how he might have slipped through. Sure, he had little if any experience or knowledge in the diagnosis of disease, but he had a pretty good interview, he played trumpet in high school, and he has a working knowledge of Matlab."

Pakes, who claims to have spell-checked his resumé "like two or three times," was also surprised the mistake made it onto the final draft. "I never even knew internist was a word, but apparently it is, because the computer never caught it. And not only is it a word, but I've learned that it's also an interesting and valuable profession to fake your way through for three or four months."

The responsibilities given to him at Cook County did not initially strike Pakes as unusual for a second year engineering student. "I always heard that almost everything you do as an intern is pretty unrelated to the work you do in the classroom. I can vouch for that...I never arbitrarily diagnosed diabetes in ME 230."