My Internship
annotated-Healthy%20Sleep%20for%20Kids%20Lab.pdfProject Summary
As part of my role in the Healthy Sleep for Kids Laboratory, I have been studying the development, detection, and treatment of a variety of sleep disorders in infants, children, and adolescents from underserved populations. My internship has revolved around two projects: Sleep and Health in the Home (SHH) and Evidence-based Detection of Pediatric Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). SHH aims to understand predictors of the disproportionate rates of high Body Mass Index (BMI) in Black and Latinx children by examining sleep and feeding patterns in infants. There is growing evidence that the risk of high BMI is associated with certain sleep and feeding patterns. In order to prevent unhealthy weight later in childhood, it is essential to identify these patterns. The OSA Project is focused on the impact of health communication in the detection of OSA in children. Through this project, we developed and refined an OSA infographic in English and Spanish with feedback from parents and medical providers. The infographic will be ultimately shown to parents to increase OSA detection and referrals. As many families participating in both studies speak Spanish at home, I have been able to apply my bilingual skills to the research.
Hmm... sleeping disorders?
I am a part of Dr. Honaker's Healthy Sleep for Kids lab. My team researches sleeping disorders in children and adolescents in underserved populations. My primary project is a study called "Sleep and Health in the Home (SHH) 2.0" which aims to narrow down parenting behaviors that might explain the high prevalence of obesity in Black and Latinx infants compared to other populations; we look at bedtime behaviors especially. It is important to identify culturally specific intervention targets in order to promote healthy habits for the populations that are disproportionately affected.
Learning and Skills
This internship will help develop my communication and problem-solving skills. I also intend to build a network among my peers and make connections with professionals in the health industry.
I am most excited about growing as a professional. I believe my time at the lab will help enhance my verbal and written communication and overall aide with my confidence. This internship will also help polish my bilingual abilities as I will be translating information between the research team and Spanish-speaking families.
Not only will I develop these transferable skills, but I will also expand my network with the help of Dr. Honaker and Dr. McQuillan. My hope is to meet medical doctors that I can connect with in the future for shadowing or possible mentoring.
So far, I have been working on my communication skills at my internship. My primary project has been on a slow start, so most of my tasks have involved attending team meetings and reading papers. However, my supervisors make sure to ask for my input during meetings and sometimes I am assigned to give summaries and updates about my project to the rest of the team. For example, I was assigned to give the team some piloting feedback about several surveys for mothers participating in the SHH 2.0 study. It was a good learning experience and situations like this have been especially helpful to work on my confidence and speaking; talking to a room full of healthcare professionals can be intimidating! I am getting more comfortable giving my input, but I will continue to work on developing my communication skills when I help translate during the interview phase.
My internship's focus is on sleeping disorders in infants, children, and teens. Some sleeping disorders like obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and insomnia have been discussed in my biology classes. Reading about these conditions at my site made it is easier to remember what my professor discussed during lecture and overall helped me do better on the exams covering that material.
When I first worked on small tasks during my internship, it was difficult to see how these things related to the big picture. Now that I look back, I can see my work has been an equally important piece of the puzzle. For instance, I started translating questionnaires from the REDcap database. Although these seemed tedious at the time, I now realize that these surveys are essential to the study because they gather important information regarding a parent's background which may be useful to figure out why parents engage in obesogenic behaviors. Translating materials for the study is also important in general because one of our main target populations is Hispanic/Latino people. I also helped send out recruitment postcards to eligible families which is important because if there were no participants there would be no study.
Now that I have been a part of my internship and the LHSI program, I can say that I have developed some of my transferable work skills. For example, I can say that I am much more confident now whenever I speak to my supervisors and other professionals in the real world; I am more comfortable with networking and presenting myself. I am more independent when it comes to a task but I am also comfortable with seeking help and asking questions when I don't know how to do something. After LHSI, I will continue to develop these skills as I plan to continue in my internship and hopefully get assigned more responsibilities. I also want to continue to develop my teamwork skills. Although I have been a part of the research team, I feel like I didn't really have to work with someone directly to finish a task. I will continue to develop these skills through my volunteer work at the Motor Activity Clinic, where I'm usually paired up with another person to carry out a workout plan.
The Workplace
Most of my work is virtual, but I have seen a few habits that I want to adopt from zoom calls and emails. My research team is good about communication through email. The responses are always timely and pertinent. Through zoom meetings, I have also seen my team be good about communicating effectively and respectfully. Sometimes there are many points to get through in one zoom meeting, and many of the team members have meetings back-to-back, so timely and effective communication is crucial. My team is good about staying on track with topics and whenever ideas are bouncing back and forth, everyone is respectful to listen and give input in turn. I do not have much to talk about yet, but when I have to give updates about my tasks, I will work on sounding more professional and actively participating in the discussion.
Working with people of different cultures and backgrounds has been quite insightful. There was a very helpful tip that gave me insight about a different culture, and it was brought up because of a conflict with a hair sample. One of the variables that my team wanted to measure was cortisol obtained through a hair sample from a mother and her infant. A medical professional expressed her concern for using a hair sample in our intended populations. This study is about Black and Latinx families with infants ranging from 4 to 6 months of age; she revealed that in the Black community it is customary to wait up to 12 months before cutting an infant's hair. We did not want a variable like this to deter Black mothers from the study, so we discussed different options for obtaining cortisol.
My internship experience has been easy-going so far. At first, I was pretty intimidated about working at a research lab with medical professionals. I also thought I would be swamped with work, but it has all been very manageable. My supervisors make sure I feel comfortable and like a part of the team all of the time. They also make sure to check-in with me in case I have any questions about my work. I thought I would be doing interviews with families in Spanish by now which also intimidated me, but with the steady start I have been able to gain better knowledge about the study and I feel more prepared about starting the interviews next semester.
Since I haven't had face-to-face time with participants yet, most of the people with different backgrounds that I have worked with have been my supervisors and my coworkers. They all have good work etiquette and they are very professional with communication through emails and zoom calls. These experiences have made me focus more on my professionalism which I will keep practicing as I progress in my internship.
I enjoyed the workplace culture at my internship. This was my first big professional experience regarding my career path, but I don't think the culture could have been much better. My supervisors, my peers, and other members of the research team were all very welcoming and supportive from the start. It is clear that the team values listening to everyone's ideas and there is an overall positive atmosphere at the lab. This internship has shaped what I value in a workplace, and I'd say it is pretty ideal.
Successes and Challenges
I've had small successes at my internship site. I am proud of finishing a transcript where I had to translate some phrasing between Spanish-speaking primary care providers and my supervisor. They were discussing a graphic that showed signs and symptoms of a condition called obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and they were seeing how well the graphic translated over to Spanish. I felt like this was my first "big" independent task, and I was able to complete it using some resources in our team's library, like a transcription service called Otter. Recently, I also helped out with my primary study by testing out a few surveys that will be used to collect information about a mother and baby's sleep behavior/stress. I was able to complete them and give feedback that ultimately helped work out some glitches. In a way, finishing these surveys have been the most challenging part of my internship. They have been the most time-consuming tasks I've worked with so far because I wanted to give detailed feedback that would be useful to the study. I had a few hiccups because the surveys stopped sending themselves to me, so I contacted my supervisor. She directed me to the tech person in charge of the surveys and they were able to find out why this problem was happening. Now I am more familiar with who to contact about certain issues, and I am more confident about speaking up and giving my point of view which will prove helpful when I get more tasks next semester.
More recently I had a task using excel to edit REDcap surveys. Excel isn't my area of expertise, so it was challenging at first because all of the coding from the surveys made the workbook look very daunting. However, my team member recorded a video for me to follow during the task which was very helpful. We also set up a zoom call so we could screen share and she could help me with any process that was too confusing. A recent success was I also learned how to copy addresses from REDcap to send them out as recruitment postcards for the SHH 2.0 study. My supervisor Sarah made very clear instructions regarding the complicated process and now I know how to send them out independently.
Mark Hyman, MD. (2021, February 9). Screentime, Sleep, And Childhood Obesity [Video]. Youtube.www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX294FVYN8s