Goals
Learning Goal #1: Gain a better understanding of research through new research experiences
How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?
This goal prepares me for the future because I will look to continue working in a research lab after I complete this internship. Learning the basics of research and how to work with a team in a research lab setting will be great experience for the future.
Update: I am working on securing a UROP grant for a project that I will hopefully be working on next school year with Dr. Fodstad. It involves the creation and maintenance of a medical database for a mental health clinic that she works at.
Learning Goal #2: Learn more about psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual disabilities through research
How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?
This goal fits into my career journey because I have an interest in mental health, and I hope to become a psychiatrist one day. I have always been interested in the way that the mind works, and I am eager to see if working in a mental health field is something I would like to do in the future.
Update: Through the Down Syndrome and ASD research that has been conducted over the past year, I have learned a lot about intellectual disabilities and some of the evidence-based interventions used by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to care for those with IDs.
Learning Goal #3: Build connections with the research team and get better at working collaboratively
How does this goal fit into your career journey or prepare you for the future?
This goal fits into my career journey because I will have to work in a team-like setting in any job that I work at in the future. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of what it means to work with a team in a professional setting is something that will help me in the future.
Update: I have been able to see firsthand how important communication is for a team to have success. Dr. Fodstad has fostering a great work environment for myself and the rest of the team, and nobody is afraid to reach out to each other for help, which is important for the success of the research.
In general, the goals that were laid out in the fall are goals that I have progressed towards, but I still believe I have not completed these goals fully. I have taken the first step in attempting to gain more knowledge in psychiatry and clinical psychology research by applying for a UROP grant to continue working in Dr. Fodstad's lab. I will continue to try and be a leader in the lab, especially with more interns coming in to her lab next year, so that is something I will want to keep note of and continue to improve upon as well.
Learning
A skill that I am getting more confident in is communication. I have been able to communicate well with my supervisor to orchestrate check-ins and ask for help if I need anything on my end. Another skill that I am getting more confident in is independence. At the beginning of the internship, I did not have a great sense of independence, but as the semester has progressed and I have a project to work on now, I feel more confident in my independence.
A skill that I would like to continue working on would be confronting challenges and failure. I haven't put myself in many, if any, situations where I have a possibility of failing, which could be a sign of complacency in the internship. Using mishaps as learning opportunities could help me do better as an intern.
A few skills that I am building on during this internship are teamwork and responding to constructive criticism. Working with a group and navigating each others' schedules has helped me be a better part of the research team and see some of the issues we have from different perspectives. Responding to constructive criticism has helped me become more responsive and work harder on my projects, as I am striving to better myself by taking accountability for my work.
This internship has helped me gain a better understanding of my coursework because it has helped me see how some of the concepts I am learning are applied to academic/clinical research. It has also helped me with my time management in my classes, as I have had to balance my coursework with this internship. As the school year has progressed into the spring, I have noticed more skills that have helped me in the understanding of my coursework. While I am a chemistry major that is working on psychiatric research, skills such as problem-solving, time management, and work ethic have been paramount to success in the internship, and I have implemented these skills into schoolwork.
Since the fall, I have been able to develop a greater ability to solve problems that have arisen. Problems such as time management, confusion on what my role is in a project, and how to go about working on a project have been prevalent in this internship, as they would be in any work environment. Dr. Fodstad and the team have fostered a very welcoming environment that allows me to ask for possible solutions when this occurs, rather than trying to do everything alone. At the same time though, I have gotten better at being independent and sufficient in the work that I am doing.
For example, one of the main tasks that I worked on this fall was data extraction from 10 articles relating to treatment of behavioral problems in people with Down Syndrome. This task involved Dr. Fodstad giving me a large Excel sheet with many different categories of data to find and allowing me to add in the data from the selected articles. In the past, I probably would have pushed off this task since it looked like a long and arduous one, but I was able to use a template she provided and structure my data extraction sheet off of it. With the help of her template I was able to complete the data extraction in a timely manner with minimal help from Dr. Fodstad and the team, and when I sent the sheet over to her for edits, she said that it looked great.
The skill that I would like to continue to improve on is confronting challenges and failure. I think I have challenged myself to a good extent this semester with the LHSI work I have done, but I think I could do more to help the team. Hopefully, with the help of a UROP grant, I can take on a bigger role in the summer and into the academic year next year by working on a project to create a medical database for one of Dr. Fodstad's clinics.