(Before Internship) 1/8/24:
Prompt: "What are you most concerned about in your internship?"
Personally what I'm worried about for my first day is not getting there at the appropriate time. This will be my first time taking the trolley alone which has been something I've been worried about for a while. I'm not exactly sure how this will work out but I know if I can push myself I will be able to do it. Another thing I am worried about is not feeling welcomed during my internship. I'm with a bunch of people that are serious and we are constantly submerged in silence as we work. Also, I remember always learning about how some people got fired from their internships. So, I'm worried that I'll accidentally mess up and it'll be over. I just need to have an open mind and just hope for the best. If I put myself out there then I know that I can make the best of it! What I hope goes well during my internship is that I get to have meaningful experiences that will help me in the workforce later in life. Also, I want to be able to make strong connections with my coworkers and higher-ups.
Personally what I'm worried about for my first day is not getting there at the appropriate time. This will be my first time taking the trolley alone which has been something I've been worried about for a while. I'm not exactly sure how this will work out but I know if I can push myself I will be able to do it. Another thing I am worried about is not feeling welcomed during my internship. I'm with a bunch of people that are serious and we are constantly submerged in silence as we work. Also, I remember always learning about how some people got fired from their internships. So, I'm worried that I'll accidentally mess up and it'll be over. I just need to have an open mind and just hope for the best. If I put myself out there then I know that I can make the best of it! What I hope goes well during my internship is that I get to have meaningful experiences that will help me in the workforce later in life. Also, I want to be able to make strong connections with my coworkers and higher-ups.
Week 1: 1/9/24 - 1/12/24Prompt: "What type of work do you plan to do? What are your hopes for your project?"
For my internship, my mentor gave me the option to do multiple projects during the month. Making the organization's winter newsletter, looking over their new data research, working on their social media posts, and making bracelets for a possible fundraiser. Hopefully, I will be able to complete all of these this month. These first 3 days I've been trying to research a lot of the vocabulary and topics that we are going to be focusing on. Some things I've been learning about led me down a rabbit hole of even more topics that I need to understand before I understand my main question. But, I'm starting to truly understand what I'm looking at. These photos are just some of the research that I was doing. I went down a rabbit hole of different parts of the brain that are affected when someone has Huntington's Disease and the effects the disease has on an individual. I also learned about families who have the HD gene and how they live with the disease. Along with learning what a person with an HD brain looks like in an MRI scan. |
Week 2: 1/17/24Prompt: "Describe your internship project. What will you be doing? What will the final product look like? Which skills (academic, creative, technical) will you utilize and/or develop as you do the project. How will the project benefit the organization?"
As I mentioned in my 1st week post one of the things my mentor wants me to work on is social media posts. This week I made my first post for the Huntington's Disease Research Center this post was to recruit new people for a study the center is trying to conduct. On the post, I incorporated the center's branding colors and tried to put them together in a way that I thought looked really good. I originally made two versions of this post and then showed it to my mentor. Each version had the same things written on them but each one had a different set of fonts. The one that was approved by my mentor was the post that had the fonts that were most similar to their other social media posts. The skills that I'm going to be using throughout this month are creative skills and academic skills. Creative skills when it comes to doing my graphic design work and academic skills when it comes to reviewing data research and researching new topics that I've never learned about before. How this will benefit the organization is by having someone who has done graphic design work in the past be able to make posts for their center. Because my mentor said that they've been having trouble designing their posts. |
Week 2: 1/18/24Prompt: "How has or do you see your internship changing the way you consider that paths your future will take?"
In the future, I want to become a Forensic Science. I want to be able to analyze crime scene data and work in investigations. In my internship I work alongside college students, all of them trying to pursue something in the medical field. Some of them have told me about how they have friends studying forensics, and it seems a really interesting and cool field of study. Them telling me that helped reassure a part of me that's nervous to go into forensics. Being in a clinical trial center has made me realize that it can get very stressful but it is what you make it. At times I feel like I don't really understand what is going on around me and what I'm looking at, but when that happens I try to do the research I can so I understand what I'm doing. I truly find science interesting and I want to pursue it but there's always something in me that says that maybe this isn't the field for me and that it will be a stressful and hard road. I'm not sure there might be one day when I'll change my mind, but to truly know if this career path is for me I just need to try. I just need to try and if it ends up not to my liking I can always change career paths and go into something that I will have a passion in. |
Week 3: 1/23/24Prompt: "Describe how experiences at HTHMA have prepared you for your experience at internship."
I wouldn't say that HTHMA prepared me for my internship it's more like my whole High Tech experience helped prepare me. I grew up in the High Tech system and we've always been taught to be very interactive and sociable, which is something that I think I've gotten used to over the years. We were always pushed to do more interactive projects that would expand our learning of the real world. Also, it made me more comfortable talking to adults and new people have become something I'm now used to doing and I can do it without worrying or being shy. Another thing that I've been prepared for is creativity and problem-solving skills. Creativity skills are always something that we constantly use within High Tech, I've used these skills for every project I have done. Always doing one side of a project that focused on creativity and something in art. Being able to work on creative projects helped me expand and learn more about graphic design work which is a big part of my internship project. Another thing I was gladly prepared for in a way was taking public transport. Taking public transport for school field trips gave me a better experience of the real world, which I wouldn't be able to experience if our school chose to take school buses. |
Week 3: 1/25/24Prompt: "What are you thankful for in your internship experience?"
There are a couple of things that I am thankful for in my internship. I'm thankful for the laughs that I have had, the people I have met, the opportunity to work at the HD center, and the good food in the area. Every day at my internship there is always something new each day, it's never a boring day for me while there. The people I work with there always make me laugh and I'm glad that I get to make them laugh as well. The people I talk to each day during my internship are so nice and just so fun to talk to, I am so happy to have met them. Getting the chance to work at the HD center and get a first-hand look at what HD does to the brain and a family for generations has been such an educational experience something that I didn't ever expect to encounter. Being able to use my graphic design skills for something that's outside of school and is going to represent an actual research center is another thing I never thought I would experience going into an internship. Also, getting into this internship where I can learn about research and data analysis gives me experience as to if I want to pursue something like this in the future. Then the last thing I am thankful for is of course the food! The food at the cafeteria nearby is surprisingly inexpensive and really good food. |
Photo Essay
For the newsletter that I am making for the center, I needed a photo of us doing one of the patient exams. This was one of the photos my coworker took of me going through the exam with another one of my coworkers.
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I went to the Jacobs Medical Center and watched two brain dissections for the first. I learned about different parts of the brain which helped me visualize the parts that are harshly affected when someone has HD. |
Sometimes I am asked to label the patient samples before putting them into the freezer. I learnt which samples were which and how to label them correctly. |
This is my Polaroid that hung up in the office, everyone who has worked on the team has a Polaroid, and being able to see mine up made me feel a part of the team.
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This is my view of leaving the HD center in the afternoon riding on the trolley. Going to an internship let me experience taking the trolley alone for the first time. |
This is the feature of the newsletter that I am working on for my project. I learnt about brain MRI's and about the different sections of the brain. |
Week 4: 1/30/24Prompt: "Post the highlights from your mentor interview and explain what makes these quotes meaningful to you."
There a 3 really good quotes that have stuck with me from my internship. The first one being, “In my life, and never occurred to me that there were things that were more likely for men or not because I just felt like we did everything." This quote stuck with me because she used to go to an all-girls school and grew up with only female teachers. So, just to see that her going to an all-girl school impacted her to go into a career where there aren't enough women representation is just so inspiring to have learned about her, it shows just how no matter the field women can do it! The second quote that stuck with me is, "I think it's important to see as much as you can because to be a really good Neurologist you have to have very broad exposure to different things." This gave me insight into what you need to do to go into her field. To be a Neurologist you need to be open to broadening your horizons and experiencing new things. The last quote that stuck with me was, “Try to think about whether you can handle the agonizing sides of it and break the bad news to patients." This helped me get more insight on how it is to be a Neurologist. Also, this made me think about the fact that to do this kind of work you need to have a passion for helping people and being able to deal with hard situations brought into your workload. |
Week 4: 2/1/24Prompt: "What are social interactions like in your workplace? Do people spend a lot of time socializing? Are people isolated, doing their own things? Lots of collaboration on work projects? Not much collaboration? How does the social dynamic impact or reflect the organization's work?"
I wouldn't say that everyone spends most of their day socializing. There are always times when it gets quiet in the office and you only hear music playing. But, a lot of the time we all will be socializing and talking and laughing. We'll always talk about different topics or something that one of us is interested in. There were also times when me and one of my coworkers would go and get food and we'd just talk on the way there and back. Everyone gets along pretty well and can just chat, so the environment isn't stressful to be around. When it comes to collaboration if someone needs help working on something anyone would be happy to help. Usually, though everyone has their own set of tasks that they need to complete and work on. Most of the people that I work with in the office with me being college students and each one of them working on a specific research project meant to help with the center. For me I'm usually working on something social media-related or graphic design-related but if someone asks me to help them with something or do something I will happily do it. |
(Final Week) Week 5: 2/7/24Prompt: "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?"
My internship has inspired me to think about college by working with college students and being able to get a first-hand account of what to expect and how things are currently going for them in their lives. Also even though I'm scared to go to college it's a normal feeling to have and once you get to college, meet the right people, and spend more time on campus you start to really enjoy college life. I haven't really discovered new colleges because I've been at UCSD the whole time during my internship but it made me really consider staying in San Diego for college instead of going out of the city or out of state. Before I never really considered UCSD as one of my schools to apply to because I'm scared that if I stay in SD for college then I won't get the experience of being in a different city with different people. However, talking to college students and my mentors gave me a little more clarity as to what I want to do and that even going to UCSD would be a different experience. If I decide to go out of the city then I won't get the experience of what it would've been like to be home for college. So, UCSD is definitely on my list now! For the courses and majors I want to pursue, I've always wanted to do something in science but before I wanted to study chemistry because I didn't really know any other science majors so I just thought that would work for me. But, talking to the college students and hearing about how they are doing all sorts of science-related majors like neuroscience, biochemistry, etc really opened my mind to think about other science-related majors to go into. |
(Final Week) Week 5: 2/9/24Prompt: "Describe what you are most thankful for in your internship experience—what experiences, what people, and so on? What new appreciations have you gained through internship and how did you develop these?"
What I am most thankful for in my internship is to have had the opportunity to work with people who are kind and I was able to connect with them. In a job, I feel like it's important to like the people you are surrounded by, and being there was just so welcoming and fun to be involved in. I think I mentioned this in a previous blog but they really made me feel welcomed and like I was one of them instead of some random high schooler that was only going to be there for a month. I got to connect with so many new people! I'm so thankful to my mentor Dr. Corey Bloom for the chance to work at the center and spend my month with her and the rest of the HDRC team. I'm thankful to myself for pushing me past the limits and pushing myself to socialize, try new challenges even though they were hard, and take the long morning trips to La Jolla each morning. Even though watching the sunrise each morning was beautiful it sure was exhausting! Some new appreciation that I have gained is definitely graphic design. I've always done graphic design work, it's just something I like, but doing it for a center at UCSD was an experience I never could've imagined experiencing when I was younger. So, I'm thankful for everything that internship let me experience it was some of the most fun I've had in a long while! -RaJanae <3 |