My Internship

There is a lack of interventions to improve for cognitive skills/memory/processing skills in cancer survivor patients, hence the ultimate goal of this project is to began studying what effects neuro-cogntive intervention may have. The project is based on a method known as the Feuerstein method, which really focuses on how individuals learn and exploring their cognitive capabilities. Past research has shown that this method has worked in traumatic brain injury, hence its application here. The intervention began with Leukemia survivors because often, there are post-chemotherapy effects on cognition. However the study has now extended to all cancer survivor types. Originally, the end goal was to have 30 recruits with 3 assessements: baseline, after 8 weeks, and after16 weeks.The project has failed to meet its initial goals, however, the investigation team is in the process of working with focus groups to make the interventions more successful to be able to eventually aid as many survivors in developing their cognitive skills.

As a freshman, I was able to be a first year apprentice in a neuroscience research lab located in IU Methodist Hospital. There, I learned how to manage my time, communicate with supervisors, other apprentices, and coworkers, and know when to say no. I hope to further develop these skills on top of learning how to communicate with patients and learn how to write a good research paper. 

Some skills I am already incorporating is communication; it has been one of the biggest things to working with such a diverse team. I am also very motivated and will come into work whenever my schedule allows. I constantly look for different ways to be involved with research so I can learn more about this field in healthcare. I have not had many opportunities to challenge myself and work independently, hence this is something I hope to work in the future. I will do this by reaching out to my team more and seeing what tasks they believe I can handle for this.

This internship has not really fit into my learning that much in class because the content is pretty different; however, one thing that has overlapped a bit is when we were learning about the mechanisms of cancer, as the doctor I work for specializes in oncology so it does give a brief explanation as to what we are working in. Hopefully next semester when I start taking neuroscience classes as well as cellular biology I will have a better application of what I am working to class. 

Something I have learned is that being a doctor entails so many things; you help diagnose yes, but there is more you get involved in, including research, talking with patients, surgery, meeting with families and loved ones, and have to learn to deal with tough situations.

My contributions helped the larger project because I am able to help them with a lot of important work that the others on the project do not have time to do. I help with things such as scoring neuropsych tests, note taking during focus groups, or otherwise that doing require high certification. By doing this tasks, the team had actual qualitative and quantitative data for their project that, if I did not do them, would have done at a much much later time and the project would not be able to move as quickly. 

After doing the self-evaluation, I realized what skills I am strong in and what skills I have yet to grow in. For instance, I am very responsible and complete all the tasks asked from me, while constantly asking what else I can do. I also do things to my best efforts and try to never present a final product that seems only half finished. Another skill that I arguably think is a strong one I have is my communication skills. I am very good at expressing frustrations, complications or problems I might have. 

One skill that could use more work is receiving critisism. I often have a hard time accepting failure and will many times overthink things. This is something I need to change because it hinders my internal growth as well as keeping the project from moving forward if I am not doing my role as a team member. I plan to work on this by working on my confidence and doing more self-reflection to see what I can do in the future to keep from having the same failures. 

My team is good at reading the room; they know when to be serious and when it is okay to joke around. I have also noticed that they care for each other and understand everyone has different situations that need to be taken into consideration. These are behaviors I would like to hold as a person and a professional. I think I am already good at asking people around me how I can help, but I think this is still an area I can grow in. 

The biggest takeaway from working on this site is that there is a huge variety of people involved in healthcare; one of the members of our team did not even graduate or specialize in anything medicine related but actually is a former principal, showing the diversity involved in this line of work and how hands from all over will come together to advance health for the community and make it a better place. 

The internship is different in the sense that it is very sporadic and I go into every week not really knowing what days I will be working, how long I will be working that day, or what I will be doing for work. I enjoy the uncertainty because it is something normally out of my comfort zone; it is a different experience than what I am used to.  

My attitudes and beliefs have been impacted by people with differing perspectives because I started to realize I have to be able to accommodate based on how that person will best understand where I am coming from. Sometimes it is harder to get through to a person on your perspective, especially if they are more stubborn or quiet. Since I have learned this, I have become more patient and reasonable with those around me because sometimes I might be the wrong one in the situation. 

Since my time working on this team, there is one thing that really stuck out to me which is how friendly the environment is. Everyone is very welcoming to one another and listens to what the others have to say, and they are understanding that we are all going through different stages of life and have different commitments. The only difference of this with my ideal workplace is that my ideal workplace is more fast-paced with a little more action. 

A win for me has been gaining the trust of my team. I have started training to be a neuro psych technician and will soon start running assessments on some participants in the cancer survivorship study, an opportunity many people get post-grad, not as a second-year student. 

A second win I have gotten from this internship is that I feel more confident in my capabilities and expose myself to the medical field. 

The most challenging part of my experience was most definitely near the beginning. Finding my place on the team was a bit of a struggle because I was not qualified enough to do a lot of work but I was mature enough to handle different situations. It has definitely gotten better, as I previously wrote I was recruited on one of the projects. Going into the spring semester, this should not be a problem because I will be fully trained and equipped by then to help out more. 

Another challenge I have started to realized I will face is that the medical field is very emotionally draining. A lot of the patients I work with are children under the age of 5 and seeing these children who have not gotten to experience much in their life struggle so much is very sad to deal with.