theLASTWEEKpost

8. In what ways has your internship inspired you to think about college?  Have you discovered new colleges that you are interested in attending?  Have you learned about new courses to study or majors to pursue? 

Every day at internship I think about college...and see college, hear college, touch college, breathe college, even smell college. That's because my internship is at the University of California, San Diego. I didn't really "discover" UCSD, but I am interested in attending and I definitely will apply here. From talking to the undergrads and researchers, I've given consideration to studying Clinical Psychology, Neuroscience, Behavioral Studies, or all three. The field of psychology is so broad that there are many specific things that can be pursued within it. I've gotten a look at the three majors mentioned above as well as psychometrics, cognitive and analytical psychology, and many other subfields. After this internship, I think about college as a workplace as well as a school. This Center and many others on campus conduct revolutionary research and often discover more than private research centers. Also, it's a great place for college students to work as paid interns, which gives internship credit and money! How great is that?

But, seriously, I think that college is the gateway to opportunity. If I go for my Master's, my options are many and I could end up as a researcher or whatever I want to be.

posts 1&2 for week3 OR "I'm bad at computer stuff because I don't watch Jersey Shore" and "Don't do it for us, do it for the Children"

4. Read another student's blog. What stands out to you? What experiences do you have in common? What contrasts do you see? What questions do you have?
Well, I chose to look at Brandi's blog because she looked at my blog to answer this same prompt from the hthmainternship blog so that she could finish the assignment for her blog so I figured there must be some great connections, which is why I looked at her blog to do my blog, it's not necessarily because I was looking for an easy blog to blog about, although that is part of the reason, although the other part might just be to make Randy do his "like, right" face and partial eye-roll.


What stands out to me is the fact that Brandi is involved in pretty cool naturey (not a word, but should be because it denotes "have to do with nature" not "of nature") stuff...(natury?) But she said something that sounds really cool (and exhausting when you think about it): "...at sweet water summit, if they were able to connect all of the little individual community trails, the trail at sweet water summit could connect all the way to CUYAMACA! Doesn't that blow your socks off?!" Well, I admit, that long of a hiking trail would be pretty cool and I might try it someday when I'm training for a marathon or when I've bought a quad...although you probably can't take quads on nature trails...


We have quite a few experiences in common. As she mentioned, we both have technical issues. I had to learn programming so that I could help fellow researchers on the social/emotional component for the longitudinal study that will start in February. I also read that she was happy not to be used as a guinea pig--was it a hamster?--or some other testable rodent by her mentor and colleagues, but was instead endowed with great responsibilities to do what no intern has ever done before. Of course, I thought it was cool that I wasn't given grunt work either (I mean these are scientists...what could grunt work be: "Hey, Noah, can you take this plutonium to Dr. Meddville at the Rady School of Medicine? You only have to carry that radioactive chemical through flocks of college students, halfway across the campus, over a couple busy roads. Good luck."?). Instead, I was treated like an adult...of course, almost everyone besides Dr. Jernigan thought I was a college student and one of the college students interning as a Research Assistant pretty much scoffed when she was told that I was 16 (I overheard). Nonetheless, I have been very happy in my position as shadower and meeting-sitter-inner-on and all-around-doer-of-things-like-making-font-italic-er.


In contrast, where Brandi has run into problems dealing with programs like Excel, I have a big problem with programs like Photoshop. I know, it's pretty simple, but I only know the basics and I don't spend my time on CS programs when I'm waiting for Jersey Shore to start (sorry Nate) so I'm just not as adept as some are when it comes to doing stuff on Photoshop or InDesign. I'm helping design a simple--simple--brochure for the Center for Human Development and I had to use an old Dell laptop where there was a visible lagtime of 5 seconds at the minimum (no exaggeration) and it took a pretty long time to do it. Not to mention that I'm still I little dazed from my bout of sickness.


I just have one question: How often do you get to go outside on the trails and preserves and stuff like that, Brandi? Because I think that kind of stuff would be neat to experience too in addition to the official side.


5. Who benefits from the qork that you do at internship? How and/or why?
I call this half of the post Do it for the Children because they're really the ones who ultimately benefit from all the qork that goes into PING and other child development studies. We do this research and test all these different things that so that other researchers trying to find a way to help kids with, let's say, autism can use our study as a control group and use their time and resources to test autistic kids, and then use the findings to help better the lives of those children. A big focus of Dr. Jernigan's is personalized education. There is already a big push in genomics towards personalized medicine, but with our findings, future generations could be treated better and taught better according to their DNA and brain structure. An insanely interesting, totally cool finding that appeared in the TDLC results on the ALEKS intervention study showed that there was a very strong correlation between FA (brain fiber tract density) asymmetry and cognition. I saw the discovery with my own eyes and now will have some very cool things to show at my iPOL. But ultimately, all these findings help the children. They help us learn how the young 'uns develop, how they mature, change, respond, mature--these studies help the men and women of the future. In the end, I'm not doing this for me. When I do this, I do it for the children.

internshipweek2response2onweek1prompt

Describe the company culture at your internship, including how people interact, communicate and work together.
At the Center for Human Development, the Researchers and Research Assistants work very well together, although the planning and coordination that makes such cooperation possible isn't an easy process. I have been with Dr. Jernigan, Erik (postdoc fellow), Connor (project coordinator), Natasha (Researcher), and the Research Assistants Shereen, David, Brian, Beatrice, and another guy whose name I always forget. All of them get along really well and always know what they need to be doing due to Google Calendar, which has all the appointments, meetings, and such posted and ready to view by the staff. It's a very friendly, quiet environment in which everyone is working and knows what they're doing, whether it be researching, testing, or analyzing. Even the administration is cordial and warm contrary to my belief that researcher and manager don't mix well.
Although things run smoothly at the UCSD Center for Human Development, I've sat in on enough meetings that there is conflict and communication issues with UCSD and the other sites participating in the PING study (Hawaii in particular....hopefully nobody from there reads this). Even though UCSD is the main site, the other locations where the study is being conducted don't always feel they need to follow San Diego's lead. One of the big issues was varying consent forms and differing eligibility requirements for the same study! Participants have to be willing to takes psychological tests, MRI scans, and give saliva samples in order to give comprehensive information the PING Database. However, some sites admitted participants who didn't want to give their DNA and didn't want to do this or that. The whole point of the study is having all of those elements that can be uploaded to the database and used as a control for future studies on psychology, imaging, genetics, or all of the above. Omitting one aspect defeats the whole purpose! Communicating this to the other sites and trying to fix other issues that come up is the biggest problem in PING right now. But the research environment and the people I work with get along great. We're doin' just fine.

...

Time stood still as I entered the room. My body was telling me it was bedtime, my mind said it was 9am, and the clock told me it was 4:00...

The SHIP of INTERNs (week2 prompt1)

In response to Prompt One (1) of the HTHMA Internship Blog for Week 2 of Internship...


A technical/skill challenge that I am faced with in the course of my internship project is my knowledge of computer programming. For my project, I will be assisting Erik Newman, postdoctorate fellow, and Connor McCabe, Staff Research Assistant (more like Manager) in creating an emotional/social examination for the Longitudinal Research Study that will be starting in February. It will test children's ability to recognize facial emotions and social awareness by asking them to match emotions to faces provided by the Radboud Facial Database (RaFD). However, since the test will be an interactive computer examination, all three of us will have to learn a few of the basics of "Presentation," which is a "high-precision program for stimulus delivery and experimental control for behavioral and physiological experiments" made by Neurobehavioral Systems. Presentation allows you to create your own examinations that can be presented on a touchscreen to evaluate children (or adults), but to program a new test we first need some basic knowledge about writing "scenarios" and using HTML and the other tech language that is used in the program. I'm not a tech kind of guy at all, so it will require quite a bit of effort and provide, hopefully, a great learning experience.

INTERNSHIP .... week1... day1

What are you most surprised by during your first week of internship and why?
I am most surprised by the fact that my mentor is not really among the people that I am working with, observing, and helping. Although Dr. Terry Jernigan is officially my mentor, I ended up learning the most from those I spent the most time with the Project Manager of the Clinical Psychology component of PING (Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics), Connor McCabe, and a number of undergraduate students who work as Lab and Research Assistants and are the ones who actually conduct examinations of PING participants. Dr. Jernigan, however, is the official Director of PING who coordinates everything between UCSD and the other 8 colleges participating in the NIH study. She is most often at meetings with administrators and other staff, or on teleconferences. Moreover, I haven't started my project yet or any actual work. At a normal workplace/job/office, I would at least be doing grunt stuff, like making copies, getting coffee, any sort of simple errand. But since I am working with a research team, I can observe what they're doing and learn what it's all about, yet I can't do the work myself, which involves data sorting and preparation for statistic computations, and uploading the results to the PING database. I haven't observed an examination yet either, but I have gone through the 9 standardized "batteries" with one of the assistants: what they say (there's a script), the basal and the ceiling of each test, how it's scored, and how cognisance, intelligence, and response across a number of areas is determined. All that information, once it is processed, is uploaded to a database that will serve as a control for future neurocognition, brain-scan imaging, or genomic studies. I've also read a report on the "Development of emotional facial recognition in late childhood and adolescence," which talks about studies on recognizing emotions. For my project, I'm going to be observing and assisting Erik Newman, a postdoctoral fellow, and Connor McCabe, a Staff Research Associate, develop an emotional/social evaluation that will test the ability of the children participating in a longitudinal study to recognize facially-expressed emotions. However, I don't believe my project will involve working with my official mentor, Dr. Terry Jernigan, that much.


What is your company's mission statement and how does it impact their work?

This is the mission statement for the Center for Human Development at the University of California, San Diego. The second paragraph does a good job of explaining how it affects their work and what they do:

The CHD is an interdisciplinary research unit designed to meet the growing need for cross-disciplinary exchange on issues related to human development. The goal of the Center is to provide a forum to enhance dialogue among members from multiple disciplines, all of whom share common research interests in the developmental sciences but rarely have the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas. The Center is organized around four integrated functional units (Research, Instruction, Dissemination, Assessment); each designed to fulfill a specific set of needs and to make unique contributions to the larger enterprise.
To achieve our goals, the CHD unites faculty and researchers from several departments and research units. Our affiliated faculty and researchers are involved in a wide array of developmental research projects and Research-Based Training & Outreach Programs, many of which are collaborative, cross disciplinary efforts. We also offer postdoctoral fellowships, opportunities for graduate students from our affiliated departments, and an undergraduate program in Human Development. Each week, faculty, researchers, and students gather to discuss a range of issues surrounding developmental research at our CHD Seminar.