My Internship

The LifeRAFT Lab

As both a clinician and a researcher, my supervisor, Dr. Kathleen Crum, is working on setting up a traumatic stress and resilience clinic at the Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. Apart from this, she is looking at how parents’ difficult childhood experiences are related to alcohol use, and to how families get along together. As a research assistant, I am involved in recruiting participants, collecting and analyzing data, making informational flyers, and interacting with children and parents.

Learning and Skills

When I first began my internship, I anticipated my prior experiences proving useful. I believed my exposure to statistics, experience conducting research (for research papers), and familiarity with Excel would help equip me. However, I could not have predicted just how essential my background in these areas would be to my success in Dr. Crum's lab.

My previous introduction to statistics allowed me to interpret data, noting potential associations.
My prior experience navigating Google Scholar to gather sources proved invaluable in conducting several literature reviews.
My exposure to Excel and familiarity with creating graphs helped me in designing graphs and tables for Dr. Crum's ISTSS poster and my IUURC poster.

Although I could see myself using those skills, it was a couple months before I realized how I would come to build on those as well. Once I had figured this out, I was able to develop a clearer idea of skills I would like to hone.

I wanted to gain a better understanding of the various statistical analyses that can be run.
I wanted to learn how to refine my search methods in the process of conducting literature reviews.
I wanted to become more proficient in formatting, labeling, and interpreting graphs.

Several months into my internship, I began working on attaining access to the data for the ABCD study and analyzing it.

I want to see if there is a significant difference between an abused child's assessment of a person's emotional state depending on their gender. My hypothesis is that a child will be more attuned to the emotional state of the gender by whom they have been more commonly abused.
Once we secure access to the data, I along with the rest of the Crum lab will be able to run statistical analyses to determine what relationship, if any, exists between a child's assessment of a man or woman's emotional state and the gender of the child's abuser.

Given the experience I have gained in research and data analysis over the past year, this will provide an opportunity for me to build on previous skills and acquire others.

Due to the collaborative nature of my work, I have been able to build on my interpersonal skills in communicating with Dr. Crum by learning how to adapt my communication to a professional context.
As someone who was working independently for the first four months, the addition of other lab members at the end of 2021 gave me the opportunity to collaborate with others and grow as a team member.
Although I tended to reflect on feedback I received during the first few months, I did not have the confidence to seek it out. During the past several months, I have been deliberate in asking for constructive criticism and implementing any necessary changes.

I have found that these skills, like the rest of my internship, tied in well with my coursework.

During the spring of 2021, I took a course on ethics and diversity in psychology, and my work in Dr. Crum's lab has allowed me not only to see those principles applied but also to apply them myself.
During the fall of 2021, I took a professional writing skills class, which exposed me to elements of design. This helped me in working on the LifeRAFT flyer.
During the fall of 2021, I also took a statistics course in psychology. Often, tasks I was performing for my internship relied on information I had just been exposed to the same week in that course. Not only was it exciting to see the real-world applications of statistics, but it also helped me understand the course material better.

Giving me the opportunity to fulfill one of my goals and the culmination of meetings several others, presenting a poster at the Indiana University Undergraduate Research Conference (IUURC) in December has been a key highlight of my internship.

This experience taught me how to work under pressure and persevere.
Working on the poster allowed me to apply statistical knowledge and analyze data for myself.
Presenting the poster gave me an opportunity to interact with other students and learn how to share study findings with those within and outside the field of psychology.

The Workplace

Although the work at my internship has primarily been virtual, I have had the opportunity to observe and take part in my supervisor's collaboration with colleagues within and related to her field. This has helped me understand the importance of teamwork and has challenged me to grow in my role as a team member.

Before I began my internship, I thought that it would be in-person since we would be conducting a study, which would require recruiting participants and on-site visits. However, when I joined in August, there was much preparation still to be done before we started recruiting participants. In fact, we are only now getting ready to submit materials to the IRB. Working in the LifeRAFT lab has given me insight into the scientific process, both empirical and bureaucratic.

Although we have yet to launch our study, I am excited to continue as a research assistant after my internship ends. I know recruiting participants will allow me to engage with communities and cultures that are different from my own. This will give me valuable practice not only in making science accessible to the public but also in understanding how much scientists have to learn from those outside the realm of academia.

Successes and Challenges

When I began my internship last August, I was uncertain of what to expect. I knew as I entered my sophomore year that I was continuing on a journey that would challenge my understanding of the world and potentially transform my career interests. I could not have begun to fathom how pivotal my internship would be in this. From August through December, I felt constantly challenged, keenly aware of my ignorance and anxious to "catch up" so that I didn't hold back the team.

Each week, Dr. Crum and I would review my list of tasks. She always had faith that I could complete them—otherwise, she wouldn't have given them to me—but I was terrified of messing up. I felt certain I was going to make a mistake and let her down. Often overwhelmed and confused, I fumbled my way through literature reviews and consent forms, screenings and code books, graphs and posters. Although it was a very uncomfortable process, I enjoy looking back on it. I consider it a success. Not because I figured out how to complete these tasks. Rather, because of the persistence and perseverance the process of learning how to complete those tasks required. It is not always where you arrive that is most significant; sometimes, it is what you traveled through that really makes a difference.

Often the way we learn is by making mistakes. We know what to do because we did what we shouldn't have done first. Mistakes are critical to our development. They give us valuable information. In fact, the evolution of almost any scientific field has been marked by the inaccurate beliefs that were widely accepted at first. This didn't hold back progress, though. It drove scientific inquiry further, as researchers and scientists continued to probe. The success of a study is not determined by whether the hypothesis is rejected or retained. This is because the goal is not to be right but to gain understanding, and, whatever the outcome, we glean valuable insight. If the goal is to grow, then mistakes are no more than opportunities masked as failures. This brings me to my second success—a realization: failure is not making a mistake; it's failing to learn from that mistake.

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