My Internship
My Internship Site
My internship is through the IU School of Medicine and Riley Hospital for Children. I'm working in the Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology under the supervision of Dr. Emily Mueller. One of the main projects we are working on is the creation of an mHealth tool for caregivers of children with cancer to help them manage their child's illness from home. This app will allow caregivers to keep track of the child's symptoms and set reminders for any medications that need to be taken. Alongside this, we are revising a manuscipt that analyzes children with cancer who went to the Riley Hospital ED with a main complaint of a fever. One other big project we are working on is the creation of a survey for caregivers of children with cancer that will give us a better idea of how family caregivers decide who else (like family and friends) will have a role in providing care for the child. Overall, this research will provide a better understanding of how we can support children with cancer and their caregivers as they navigate the healthcare system. This is important because family caregivers play a massive role in the child's cancer journey and treatment.
My First Publication!
an mHealth App to Support Caregivers....pdfElevator Pitch Visual
Why did I choose this internship site?
When I was browsing all of the available work sites through LHSI, I was captivated by the work that Dr. Mueller and her research team is doing because I live with a rare genetic disease called Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP). The qualification for this site stuck out to me because it stated that they wanted an intern who was comfortable having conversations with caregivers of children with medical issues. Because I have lived the majority of my life with a rare disease and have gone through multiple major surgeries, I knew that being empathetic with caregivers who are watching their children go through similar situations would be natural for me. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to interview these caregivers because it will give me a chance to learn how to have professional and meaningful conversation with others from a medical point of view.
How will this experience build on the person that I currently am?
Having the opportunity to work under Dr. Mueller and her research team will allow me to strengthen the research skills I have already obtained, teach me how to communicate professionally while working mostly remotely, and strengthen my communication skills by interviewing caregivers of children with cancer. Because I worked in a research lab within the School of Science last year, I am excited to see how I will further develop my data collecting and analyzing skills. Because most of the work I will be doing for this internship can be completed online, I will mostly be working from home due to COVID-19. This experience will teach me how to maintain efficient communication skills with my team from a distance. Because I will be participating in interviews with caregivers of children with cancer, this not only allow me to strengthen my professional communication skills, but it will also help me learn how to show empathy towards the situations that they are living through.
What do I hope to gain from this experience?
While I'm at my internship, I want to become more comfortable with researching medical publications, writing literature reviews, analyzing data, and organizing my time. Most of the work I am doing right now revolves around all four of these items. Because I have never done in-depth literature reviews or research before, I am learning as I go. At first, it took me a long time to figure out what to do. However, as time went on, I became more familiar with these tasks. Although I am still mastering how to do each of these items, I am now aware of how I should organize my time between projects based on how prioritized they are by the team. At this point in the semester, I anticipate that my contributions will heavily involve performing medical research and analyzing data from patient charts. These skills will be incredibly useful for my future as a medical student because I will be expected to write research papers/literature reviews and analyze different types of data.
Successes
Throughout my whole experience with LHSI thus far, my most successful accomplishment was learning how to review patient chart informations remotely with limited supervision. I was nervous to learn this skill because it is something completely outside of my realm. However, once I learned the basics on abstracting patient information, I became very efficient at the task. My team was open to helping me whenever I had questions or got confused.
Some other things that I have felt successful with at my internship site are coding information in a program called Nvivo, writing literature reviews, and submitting a protocol to the IRB. These are all things I didn't envision on learning how to do this semester, but I am ecstatic that I have been able to learn these valuable skills. Because all of my work is done remotely, I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to meet the expectations for all these tasks. However, my team gives me great feedback which allows me to go above and beyond what is required of me.
Challenges
An obvious challenge that has been faced so far is not being able to work in person with my team members due to the ongoing pandemic. At times, this can make communicating questions/concerns difficult. However, I have been able to efficiently communicate problems through our weekly Zoom meetings, text, and email.
Another challenge that I have experienced is managing time between projects. Some weeks have a light workload, and I am able to organize my time efficiently. However, there are other weeks when I have a lot of work to do in several projects. Without planning ahead my week, it can be difficult to determine how much time should be spent on each project. I have learned through trial and error to prioritize the projects with the earliest deadlines and that will require the most attention.
Integrating My Internship and School
Writing literature reviews for my internship site has helped me significantly in writing formal lab reports for my chemistry lab. Although my lab reports do not involve doing deep research in PubMed, I have to be able to convey my thoughts in an organized, understandable, and professional manner. This is also how I have to write my literature reviews! I have been able to transfer skills between this aspect of my classwork and my internship successfully. Similarly, because I have to be able to analyze data in my chemistry lab and at my internship, I have been able to improve this skill in different ways. This makes me well-rounded in several areas of data collection.
This internship will help me gain a better insight of my classwork by teaching me skills that I will need in my future career as a medical professional. Because most of my internship work revolves around medical research, I am getting a taste of what my classwork will look like as a medical student. Having this insight will help push me to do my best in my current classes.
Expectations
Before starting my internship, I had some ideas of how my work would go:
I would be helping to develop an app for caregivers of children with cancer.
I would participate in literature reviews and some research.
Most of my work would probably be done from home due to the ongoing pandemic.
Reality
Here's how things actually went!
All of my work was done from home, but I was still deeply engaged with all of the projects I was working on.
I worked on multiple projects, which involved qualitative and quantitative data.
I learned some crucial skills for my future goals, like how to access/read patient medical records, write literature reviews, and recruit volunteers for research.
Surprises!
Things that have surprised me during my day-to-day work life:
How engaged all of my work is (considering I am working from home)
How easy it is to communicate with my team only using e-mail and Zoom
The skills I'm learning, including data abstraction, coding in Nvivo, and leading interviews with caregivers of children with cancer
My Contributions and Role as a Team Member
As a member of Dr. Mueller's team, I helped out by proofreading work that either Dr. Mueller or Anneli did and provided feedback for them. This is something we did frequently for each other. I believe I made a great addition to Dr. Mueller's team because I'm self-motivated, open to constructive criticism, and focused on providing high quality work.
While I was working under Dr. Mueller and her team, there were multiple projects that I contributed work to. The details of these experiences are below.
Co-Design and Creation of the Cope 360 App
Most of the work I did for Cope 360 involved the use of Nvivo qualitative software to find common themes among interviews recorded with caregivers of children with cancer during the alpha phase testing of Cope 360. Some of these themes included comments/questions about logging in, creating a caregiver and patient account, and logging symptoms. These common themes were used to write the results section for the drafting of the manuscript outlining what we found while performing these interviews.
The work I did here is important for the bigger picture because if the interviews are not coded into common themes, it is difficult to generalize information to be able to write about the results of this phase of testing.
Survey of Caregivers of Children with Cancer
For the creation of this survey, I wrote the IRB (Institutional Review Boards) protocol. This protocol is very significant because it provided us with the go-ahead to write and distrubute the survey. Without the IRB's approval, we would not be able to do this research project.
Some other contributions I made to the creation of this survey include brainstorming ideas for questions we could ask and helping edit each draft of the survey. By contributing my thoughts to the layout of the survey, we are able to get feedback from multiple sources to help make the survey easy to fill out while still obtaining all of the information we need.
Medical Data Collection
For one of the projects we are working on, I had to go into patient medical records and pull information including date/time of ER visits, the date/time of their next clinical visit, and if the child got admitted. This information was used to write the results section of a manuscript revision that is focused on emergency medical experiences.
The work I did for this manuscript is important because without all of the patient information that I gathered from the medical records, we would not have been able to write the results section for this manuscript.
My Greatest Strengths
While at my internship site, I learned that some of my greatest strengths are self-motivation, focus, and reliability. Working remotely isn't always easy due to the fact that everything I do is done from home. This allowed a lot of opportunities for me to slack. However, because of how driven I was to provide my best work for all the projects I worked on, I didn't let that deter me.
Balancing 3-4 research projects can be overwhelming at times, but because of how focused and goal-oriented I am, I was able to stay on top of my work and get everything done by a reasonable time. I always made sure that everything I did was the best possible work I could do. Because of this, I also learned that I am a reliable team member.
Spring Reflections
In the time that I have been working with Dr. Mueller and her team, I have become more aware of my ideal workplace culture. I have absolutely loved the environment that Dr. Mueller created while I worked with her. The atmosphere was laidback and welcoming, but we were also organized, efficient, and to-the-point with the work that needed to be done. This is the kind of workplace environment that I strive in because while there is some pressure behind the work I completed, I also knew that Dr. Mueller wouldn't ask me to do more than I could handle. The work challenged me and helped me learn more about myself and what kind of environment is ideal for me.