Goals

Internship Goals

The first goal I want to work towards with Dr. Salih is to learn how to write scientifically. So far, I have been reading different scholarly journals to learn how they are formatted and the type of language used. Next, I hope to prepare a short summary/literature review of the articles I have read to have an opportunity to practice what I am learning.

The next goal I want to work towards is to learn how to communicate with professionals in the field. Thus far, I have been communicating with Dr. Salih both over Zoom and e-mails and, in the future, we will be collaborating with her colleagues on the survey project we are working on.

The final goal I wish to work towards is to improve my ability to work independently. So far, Dr. Salih has had me prepare all of the articles and complete any training on my own. This has helped me to learn how to work without a lot of guidance and we will continue this set-up to help me further improve upon this skill.

Career Goals

I plan on applying for admission to the nursing program in Fall 2022. After I complete my BS in Nursing, I plan on attending graduate school to earn my DNP and become a nurse practitioner. I chose this career option because it is what I am most passionate about in medicine and will give me the best opportunity to grow my skills in patient care. Having just switched to this major, I am very confident in my choice because I was unhappy in my previous major and spent a lot of time researching different career paths and ways of achieving those goals. I hope to explore this career more by volunteering with VIDA at their student outreach clinic and by taking classes to complete my prerequisites.

To help reach this goal this semester, I need to perform well in the prerequisite classes for the nursing application. These classes include psychology, anatomy, and physiology. I also need to perform well on the TEAS test which is a test similar to the SAT that is used as part of the nursing school admission process.

When I first submitted the application for LHSI, I intended on majoring in biology and Spanish on a pre-med track. This has now changed because I wish to focus on nursing instead of biology. Instead of becoming a doctor, I want to become a nurse practitioner. To help make this big career goal more manageable, I plan on doing well in my classes this semester to have an excellent application score for nursing. By this time next year, I hope to be well on my way to earning my undergraduate nursing degree which is the first step in starting the journey to be an NP.

This internship has helped me realize that I enjoy collaborating with other professionals in research and enjoy receiving feedback from peers about to better help them and think of new trainings or programs that may help. This has caused me to consider a managerial nursing position in the future in which I will be able to do exactly this. I feel confident in my ability to select this as a potential career path for myself because I am able to recognize the situations in which I thrive and the ones in which I feel suppressed and am not able to perform to the best of my ability.