Having this internship allowed me to further my professional development in many ways. First, it gave me the chance to mix the environments of working as a team and working individually. Since my internship is a mix of these working styles it gave me the opportunity to continue to strengthen my collaborative team-working skills as well as my independent hard working skills. I was able to learn how to be a dependable researcher while continuing to be a responsible, dedicated, and motivated worker. This internship also gave me perspective and experience relating to child disabilities and behavior, which is something that I will encounter in my career someday as a Pediatric Physical Therapist.

I spent a lot of my time verifying and analyzing data as well as attending professional meetings with the research team. I contributed by using my organization and hard working skills while verifying the data and communicating my findings to the team. I also developed many detail-oriented skills throughout our systematic review project since I read many articles and extracted specific data. I'm very excited to continue to strengthen these skills as I work with Dr. McHenry over the summer as well. Collecting data, organizing, and reading research are tasks that I will continue to do as a Physical Therapist.

My internship has fit in with the classes I'm taking in many ways. First, it has shown me the overall significance of statistics in research. I took a statistics class during the fall semester of 2021, and we covered topics like variance in data, hypothesis testing, analyzing data, and much more. I've seen how these topics are used in research through my data entering and verification responsibilities. I've also learned a lot about children with cerebral palsy so far, and I will continue to learn through the completion of our systematic review. Disabilities like this one are ones that have been mentioned in my classes and are what I will continue to learn about in the upcoming years.

During my internship, I've learned how to properly enter and verify data in a database, how to work and collaborate with a research team to create a systematic review on a topic that is relative to my field of study, and how to increase my communication, time management, and organization skills. My favorite part of the work that I do is when the team and I come together to meet about what we've been working on and discuss our progress. When we see everything coming together with our research it's such a great feeling. This internship has brought so many great experiences along with it, and I'm very grateful for everything I've learned so far.

After spending time with many professionals in the workplace, I've noticed many behaviors and traits from these role-models that I would love to have as a professional. Many of the researchers that I've worked/met with have been very experienced, prepared, and passionate. I think these three descriptions make a very good and hard worker, and it's a big goal of mine to be similar to them in my future. In order to grow as a professional, I would love to focus on getting more experience in this area. I didn't have many previous opportunities to study child development and behavior before this internship, so it can be challenging to offer my opinion on a topic that other researchers are much more experienced in. However, I hope to use this as an opportunity to strengthen my knowledge in this area of study so in my future I will be able to help even more.

At the beginning of my internship I assumed that I would be focusing on just one task throughout the whole year. However, Dr. McHenry has been giving me so many amazing opportunities and ideas to further my professional development through her research. I haven't only been doing one singular thing, and I'm so grateful for that. Each project and idea she has introduced to me has given me skills and experiences that I will use in my future.

My internship has allowed me to work with other researchers from many diverse cultures that are different than mine. Our research teams meet on zoom regularly, so we are able to work with professionals from all over the country. We've even met with a physician that lives in Kenya. This experience is one that I'll never forget, because I've been able to learn about other areas of living and cultures that I haven't been introduced to before.

In my opinion, teamwork is one of the most important keys to success. I have many different strengths that will allow me to be a good team member including respectfulness, dedication, and trustworthiness. I am always respectful to those around me because I believe everyone should be treated with respect and doing this makes a better working environment. I am very dedicated to any job or task that I have, which allows me to be successful in a group setting because my coworkers will always be able to depend on me to give it my all. Lastly, I am very trustworthy. Trust is very important when working as a team, especially when your job affects others- like physical therapy. My coworkers, patients, and supervisors can always trust me to do my best and be an efficient worker. Throughout my LHSI internship my research team and I had great teamwork because of our respectful, dedicated, and trustworthy environment.

As an intern, I've been the most successful with the progress I've made in our systematic review. I've never been a part of writing a review before and at first I wasn't sure what it would encounter. However, I'm proud of myself for learning a lot about our topic and how to write a review so I can efficiently work on screening articles, extracting data from full-texts, and creating this review with a great team of researchers.

So far, the most challenging part of my experience as an intern was adjusting to the flexibility of my own work hours. I meet with my supervisor and the research team regularly, but when I'm completing tasks on my own I found it hard to stay productive since I could work on it whenever I decided to. I overcame this challenge by setting a schedule for when I would work on my internship, like a schedule that would've been given to me. I would give myself a specific amount of time to get a task done, and I was much more efficient and successful this way.