Internship
My internship focuses on sex education within adolescent medicine this includes various things on the spectrum from informed consent to HIV/STD prevention. My site works with various things such as evaluating data from instructional programs given to students to interviews about things such as PrEP. This research is important because it shows what students do and do not know about resources out there alongside what they do and do not know about risky behaviors that they are more likely to engage in because they are in that adolescent stage. This research also helps the Indiana Health Department know what programs are effective and what programs could be updated and how they could be updated.
Picture: PrEP Daily
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Internship Capstone Presentation Summary & Link
Although adolescent pregnancy rates have decreased, the US continues to have one of the highest adolescent birth rates among high income countries. In rural Indiana, teen pregnancy prevention programs are not widely implemented in health education. Little is known about what types of teen pregnancy prevention programs exist, what are the needs for programming, and what are the community challenges with implementation. I plan to explore community needs around reproductive health education and what are the challenges and facilitators to implementation by interviewing stakeholders in rural counties. My questions will include information around reproductive health education. I will record and transcribe the interviews and then conduct thematic analysis. And I will share the summary of findings with our community partner, Health Care Education and Training.
Exploring the Barriers and Facilitators to SRH Ed. Presentation
Learning and Skills
In this role, I use my ready to learn spirit to allow me to openly receive and understand new information about tasks relating to qualitative data analysis and various other things. I use this knowledge to then perform tasks that I am given, independently. I also use my communication skills to effectively communicate with those I work with in my position.
From my internship I have been able to advance my excel skills, form an alternate perspective to the way I think about things especially within the health field, and gain a stonger understanding of adolescent behavior and the things that influence it. This skill will help me in my future courses in which having a basic understanding of excel will be an advantage. But also, as someone who wants to work with adolescents, it is important for me to see their thought processes relating to a variety of things ranging from healthy coping mechanisms and relationships to risky behaviors that could possibly increase their chances of needed to see a psychiatrist.
I am most excited to gain research experience through this internship as it was something I had wanted to do previously but shied away from pursuing a career in research due to uncertainty of finding success. I think that this internship will show me how my preconceptions of why I may not be successful in the research field were wrong and will reignite my desire to eventually incorporate research into my future career.
My contributions to my internship site helped accelerate the qualitative analysis of attitudes/knowledge of PrEP in Western Kenya. My work also helped with the qualitative analysis and quarterly review of life skill programming that we provided the Indiana Department of Health. Lastly, what I am most proud of is that my capstone project showed our partners what the barriers are to more comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education which hopefully will aid in future implementation.
Skills and Self Development
In this internship typical soft skills such as my collaboration skills have grown immensely. Before starting with LHSI, I was told a there was a lot of independent work with the internship sites; while this is true, I have still worked collaboratively with people that have different expertise and I have been mentored by many.
As I leave my internship site, I am going to take the knowledge I gained about specific things such as SRH Education and PrEP but I also plan to take my new skill of qualitative analysis and the new perspectives I have been given to see data through.
Professionally, I want to continue to grow to be more of an independent worker and I want to be better at networking and nourishing relationships. My internship site has taught me to not be afraid to ask questions or to reach out to people who are doing something you may want to do to hear their perspective and journey.
Co-Curricular Learning
This internship has allowed for me to see parallels between applied research and what I'm learning in classes such as my Introduction to Sociology course. Currently, I am able to see the sociological perspectives and different effects of theories in my qualitative analysis work with my internship. This has allowed me to see what I'm learning in class in an real world setting. In the future, I expect to be able to make connections to my internship in courses such as statistics where my knowledge in qualitative data might even give me a foundation that may help me to be more successful than I would have been had I not gained these skills.
Growth & Development
My abilities and skills that I had prior to starting and at the beginning of this internship such as communication, problem solving, and perseverance were already strong but have definitely gotten stronger as a result. I have noticed through self-evaluations and reflections that the areas that I have developed the most in my internship are areas that I am already highly capable in but let fear and insecurity hold me back from performing and embracing those skills to my full potential. An example of this is independence, at the beginning of this internship I was fully capable of being assigned a task and getting it done once provided instruction without needing someone to be with me step by step. However, I have learned in this internship that independence is about more that just being able to do a task, it is about being given tasks with more freedom and less instruction and still being able to persevere through confusion and hesitation and provide a result that you can be proud of and that reflects what the ideal end product. In my internship I have had many run-ins with applications of skills such as independence, teamwork, and taking constructive criticism that have allowed me to grow instrumentally in these areas.
As a student I have been guided through this journey of college by advisors, professors and mentors. So I have had a false sense of independence but this internship has shifted my view on what that looks like when it comes to work. This has been and still is a great opportunity for me to develop a stronger sense of independence because when I am in medical school, I will have to be more independent than I am now. When I go to residency, I will have to be able to be independent.
I would also like to highlight that being apart of a team where every person's contribution is needed to be successful, I have learned so much. I see parallels between what I know about how medical teams work and my own internship site. I don't have many opportunities in my courses to work in a team but, moving forward when I do have that opportunity I will do my best to make sure everyone contributes and that they feel heard.
Experiences
One of my favorite experiences that I have had in my internship was getting to learn how to code and coding qualitative data recieved from interviews. This experience allowed me to see parallels between my sociology and psychology courses and real world situations. It also allowed for me to learn a little bit more about people's thought processes and the effects of society on actions and the conscious mind.
Experiences like these have made me a better student, as I am able to see parallels and then have a stronger understanding in class. They will also make me a better professional as I am already starting to see parallels and making connections which are connections that will give me a stronger foundation for when I start medical school and will allow for me to have a more well-rounded, versatile perspective as a student and medical professional.
Workplace
As a professional teammate I desire to be more on the ball with assignments in group tasks. I have observed others within my internship and I admire how sometimes they are 10 steps ahead. Overall as a professional, I want to work at blending in with the group seamlessly to work together to get a task completed.
My internship site is compromised of people from so many different backgrounds who took completely different paths to get there. So far, from conversations with people I have worked with or who are on the team, I have learned so much about vital skills such as patience and perseverance and a different perspective regarding how these virtues look in practice.
In my internship my scope has also been broadened when taking qualitative data as when I have coded qualitative data, often others on the team who differ from me on the basis of culture and experience level have had a different connotation regarding data. Because of this, I have now opened my interpretative mind to take more perspectives in account when analyzing data.
Tasks & Workload
When I first started my internship, I didn't know what to expect regarding workload as I knew that my site was finishing up projects so what they were working on when I interviewed with them would not be what I would be working on. Overall, I expected to have more communication with various groups; however, I have loved gettting to dive into the qualitative analysis world and become more acquainted with my computer and various functions on programs such as Microsoft Excel.
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The workplace culture, I value having a welcoming and warm working environment that I can flourish in. My internship site provided just that, working in a team with Dr. Mary Ott, Carolyn Meagher, Tracy Imburgia, and Neil Davis was an enriching experience. Although a lot of my work was independent they all guided me through it while providing me space to grow and learn how to excel at the new skills I was provided with independently.
More importantly, the workplace values that I have in regard to an environment that is warm, constructive, and overall conducive to getting work done and impacting lives are values that are illustrated through the teamwork they display everyday.
My internship site provided the ideal workplace culture and environment. As an intern I felt so welcomed and appreciated. Specifically Carolyn Meagher, my direct supervisor and the resident clinical research coordinator, helped keep my morale extremely high through thoughtful gifts & cards, her amazing flexibility, and constant support she provided me.
Successes and Challenges
Successes
Throughout the course of my internships I have had many successful moments that have continued to motivate me to do my best everyday. The first assignment I was tasked with was qualitative analysis of interviews. I got the hang of this pretty quickly and then faced an obstacle when I didn't have coded interviews. My supervisors guided me through the coding process and I was able to jump over this hurdle and code the interviews and future projects successfully.
Another instance that made me feel successful in my internship was the quarter analysis report that I wrote to go into the overall report for the Indiana Department of Health. I had written a report earlier in the semester however the report that we provided them with in December was more important. When writing my portion of the report, I made sure to reflect on changes my supervisor made to the previous one and take on the style of text that she created in it. And although I was running out of time to get the entire portion completed, I made sure to get it done and complete the infographic that was asked for. Leading up to this deadline, I had a rough semester that prevented me from being as efficient and clear minded as I had hoped throughout my work days. So, being able to complete all of the necessary components was a major win for me and my supervisor was impressed with my work which made me feel even better. I am not the first and will not be the last intern to suffer with imposter syndrome or to not understand that their work is making a difference within their team so being able to see how appreciated my work was made me feel like a valued team member.
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Challenges
As a student who started college during COVID-19, I have found much success in the increase of online classes. It allows me to allocate my time better throughout the day and it satisfies the perfectionist in me as I am able to submit work that I am truly proud of more often than not. However, I thought this could also be applied to my internship and I was wrong. I thoroughly enjoy being able to not be in an office from a certain start time to the specified end time everyday that I work. But, it took me awhile to be able to successfully juggle my busy schedule, what I need to get done in a day, and virtual work for my internship. I came to the conclusion towards the end of my first semester in my internship that I enjoy a more structured work environment and that if I wanted to have a remote day then I would have to truly work to create the structure and time I needed to effectively pull it off. I can proudly say that I definitely grew in this area by the end of the semester; however, I plan to continue to work on it and to forgo that remote day when I have really important projects that I think could be done more efficiently in the office.