My Internship
My internship is the Lifespan Resiliency After Family Trauma (LifeRAFT) program through Indiana University’s Behavioral Health Research Program. We are focused on how stress can have an impact across generations by influencing brain development, behavior, and the relationship between a caregiver and a child. To answer these questions, we use a combination of questionnaires and functional MRI scans. The research done in this study can be helpful in addressing generational trauma. It is estimated that 50 percent of women and 60 percent of men have experienced at least one traumatic event in their life. This is our website: https://medicine.iu.edu/faculty-labs/crum.
The Lifespan Resiliency After Family Trauma (LifeRAFT) research program studies how stressful life events affect how parents and their children think, feel, and act by using questionnaires, DNA samples, and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans. The purpose of our research is to examine how the difficult things that parents and their children have been through in their lives affect them so that we can help make better treatments for those who have gone through traumatic experiences. One of the LifeRAFT research studies focuses on parents’ stress and substance use and how those two problems relate to their children’s brain development. Understanding how parents' mental health and children's development are related is important because it might help us understand why some children are at greater risk for substance use and other problems than others. In turn, we could reduce negative outcomes for children at the greatest risk.
Learning and Skills
My internship experience is allowing me to learn how to work in scientific research. I am being exposed to the "behind the scenes" of what goes into creating a study from scratch. I want to come from this internship knowing how to conduct an experiment on my own and how to interact with colleagues in a professional setting. I am most excited to be contributing to new research and working with new people who are in the same field that I want to work in.
Since starting my internship I have grown more confident in my work. I still ask for help when I am lost on what to do, but I take it upon myself to find a solution. I still want to improve my intrapersonal communication skills because I feel that talking to other interns and professionals about their work outside of my internship will help me develop a solid network.
As a psychology major, I have taken and am taking classes that fit in with my internship such as Abnormal Psychology, Ethics and Diversity in Psychology, and Social Psychology just to name a few. My internship is helping me gain real-world experience instead of just having book knowledge.
The Workplace
During my time with my research team, I have noticed how everyone in our workplace is supportive and will be completely honest. They are able to ask for help when needed and they are very open to constructive criticism. I want to improve on sharing my thoughts with my team members so I can have a better relationship with them.
Before coming to work at my internship I had never had a job that focused on what I want to do for my career. I thought that this type of work was going to be very rigorous and be very mentally demanding and that the people I would work with would be entitled and mean since they had their degrees. Now that I have actually done this job for several months, it is very rigorous but it is very rewarding. I think that my supervisor and the people that I work with are the most amazing people. They are very helpful and encouraging and we really have a team environment with a common goal. My attitudes and beliefs haven't really been impacted by engaging and working with people who have different perspectives and backgrounds because I believe in showing everyone respect. Growing as a professional in the role as a research assistant has looked like learning how to prioritize tasks, learning how to help others when they need it, and learning all about how to conduct a research study from beginning to end. I would love to grow in all of these areas because I still have some learning to do, the learning and growing never stops.
Successes and Challenges
One time that I felt successful was when I did my first literature review as an intern. I have written literature reviews before but I was always given the article and preset questions to answer. This time I had to search for a credible article and make up my own questions to answer. Another time that I felt successful is when I taught myself how to use RedCap and use decision-making logic. This was very challenging for me, even with using tutorial videos but I kept trying and finally got it! Through these successes, I've learned perseverance. This is something I can apply to succeed in my academic and career goals because I know that there are going to be some tough times and things that I won't know how to do at first but if I keep trying I will be able to get through it.
The most challenging part of my intern experience has been having a never-ending to-do list. I'm very used to completing my to-do lists but as a research assistant, your job is never really completed. Talking to my team, I learned that there isn't much I can do about this since this is typical for this field of work. I think that having this experience will help me get used to this "challenge".