My Internship
My internship is at the School of Physical Therapy supervised by Dr. Kristen Metzler-Wilson. My site is working on how skin blood flow is influenced by introducing different stressors through the surface of the skin. The stressors include heat, chemical substances like aceltycholine, and others. This results will be compared to the skin blood flow of people with rosacea because their face tends to get red when they are affected by an excitatory stimulus. The impact would help understand what next steps to carry in the better treatment of the condition. Because as of now, it can't be cured.
April Showcase.pdfProject Summary/ Abstract
Ransome Adeyeye summary project.docxFinal project
Learning and Skills
I will build my strength by being open to correction and being ready to learn because only with an open mind can I accept everyone's ideas rather than disregarding them . Also, being ready to learn will build my strengths because I will be fully prepared in knowing what I am supposed to do before going to my internship site so I don't slow down the rate of work.
I have gained more experience on my ctitical thinking and problem solving skills due to the trainings I've gotten form my supervisor and colleagues. I also have improved my accuracy skills, as I continued to read graphs of previous studies and this has improved my overall understanding of what my role in the internship is. One of my favorite experience was when I read a journal article and the result found from the study was quite the opposite of what I thought would have happened based on my knowledge, and this made me even more interested in how the brain works.
I am most excited about the research process of the experiment because of how fascinating different theories are been tested, and their outcome.
In my internship, I read a lot of research journals and articles and some of the terms used in the articles are concepts I'm learning in class. For example, most scientific research use inferential statistics Analysis of Variance, ANOVA, to find the relationship between their data and I'm learning how ANOVA works and how it is used to support hypothesis in my statistics class. My internship could help me gain deeper understanding of my coursework by increasing the number of journal articles I read, thus improving my knowledge of my internship's goal and more concepts that are being covered in my classes.
My contributions are impacting the larger goal by finding the ways skin blood flow can be modified to produce healthy result and different methods or techniques that can be used to make this phenomenon effective.
The Workplace
One of the behaviours I have seen that I want to have as a professional is the positive work ethic my supervisor and other members have. Most of the people in my internship are very busy with graduate school, work outside school, teaching and other tasks. But they don't allow this to wear them down instead, they try to make the site a fun place to work thus making everyone more productive. Everyone in the site also treat others with respect and are always paying attention to what anybody is saying regardless of the difference in academic and clinical knowledge.
I've learnt that people from different backgrounds would think a certain way about a concept and when all the ideas are put together, it makes our conversation very fun. Secondly, I work in the school of physical therapy and my supervisor feels a little bit bummed when I am not using the right posture while performing a certain task. But I have learnt how to perfoem those activities with the correct posture over time.
This is my first internship and I didnt have any thoughts of how things would be when I started but everyting has been going well in the internship.
Successes and Challenges
One of the time I felt successful was when my supervisor gave me some data to organize. She told me the data was part of a journal article she was writing and it was getting ready to the IRB for review. This made me pressured because any mistake could cause a delay to the release of the article but all the calculations and data were correct. Some of the actions I took was asking a lot of questions to make sure I was accurate on the instructions given and I didn't hesistate to ask for help when needed.
Some of the challenges I faced was understanding jargon terms used both in my internship and in some of the articles I read. And I didn't want to ask what it meant so as not to disturb their flow of speech. In the future, I will try to ask about the jargon terms so as not to feel lost during discussions. Another challengeand success experienced was during the analysis of the study I was working on, some of the data got deleted. I and my supervisor tried all we could to restore the data, but to no avail. This was a challenge because it set us back weeks of work but we learnt from the experience by immediately backing up our data right after we finished inputting data, and we also found a easier way to analyze the data while trying to fix and restore the original one.