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.
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