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The LifeRAFT lab focuses on the effects of trauma-induced stress on the minds of children. Essentially, it explains children's behaviors and actions. We hope to help children who struggle with mental health problems and parents who are seeking out help for their children. At our internship site, we work with an MRI machine to conduct brain scans, but it can be dangerous since the machine's magnet is strong enough to attract metals as small as rings and as big as shopping carts!
Workplace
- I use my listening & communication skills from my time as a 21st Century Scholar mentor. As a mentor, I provide assistance and guidance to students who need it. I listen to students as they ask questions and tell me about their progress as a freshman in college. I believe listening and communication skills are important to have since I will be receiving feedback from my advisor during my internship. In case of any malfunctions or errors during the neuroimaging, I will have to communicate with my team.
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- I've gained leadership skills from working with classmates on group projects. In times when no one was willing to take the initiative and start working on our project, I'd push my team by assigning tasks to each member. I believe leadership skills are an important skill to have since a lot of the time I will be working with others in the lab. I'll need to know when to take the initiative and when to put my foot down on certain topics.
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- Teamwork is a skill that I have accumulated over the years. I believe I used it most during my time as a 21st Century Scholar mentor. I would work with my team during team-building exercises and our monthly meetings. Through those meetings, I learned how important it is to hear everyone's thoughts and create something that everyone agrees on. I believe teamwork skills are a necessity to have during my internship since I will be working with a team the entire time. I will have to take their opinions into mind, while also sharing my own.
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- My internship site has told me multiple times that I am flexible, optimistic, and an eager team member. I'm always willing and excited to learn something new and shift my hours if needed. At the beginning of the internship, I was still relatively new to everything, so I wasn't given any tasks that were too complex. I would shadow my supervisors and learn my way around Microsoft Teams. Now I conduct drug screenings and administer surveys to both parents and children. I recently started to work behind the MRI, which is something I've been wanting to do for months. I've made many contributions, such as recruiting and screening participants for this study. Our goal is to gather as many participants as we can so that we can see the effects of parental substance abuse on children's mental health. Through my recruitment, I was able to gather a large number of people to help with our study. There were times I felt like I was not doing enough at my internship, but looking at the big picture, I see that I was able to help my internship run these scans efficiently and collect data from our participants.
About the internship
Project Summary
Success and Challenges
Successes
1. I was proud of myself for conducting the parent portion of our research study visit! A study visit is a scheduled time where we meet with participants who are willing to help with our research. During these visits, the child gets drug tested and pregnancy tested. After going through the procedures, the child goes into an MRI to get their brain scanned. While the child is doing that, the parents fill out surveys and if need be get safety screened for self-harm. At the beginning of our visits, I administered drug tests and pregnancy tests for our participants. After documenting their results, I handed out surveys to the participant's parents and answered questions that they had. I remember being nervous since it would be my first time working alone with a participant, but it went well! I was afraid of not being able to answer the questions the parents had for me. I've watched my supervisor conduct this portion of the visit, but doing it alone would be a first. In the end, the parents did ask me multiple questions, but during the visit I was able to contact my supervisor and ask her those same questions. I consider my supervisor my resource since I had shadowed her and asked her questions during the visits. In the future I will continue to rely on my supervisors for questions I do not know the answer to. I've attained so much information due to the answer I have received. In future experiences I will continue to ask questions that I cannot solve alone. I've also improved my Microsoft Office skills! I frequently work with Excel and Teams to document and upload participant information.
One of my goals for my time at this internship was to take the lead for the child portion of a visit. This includes working behind the MRI and communicating with the child as he or she gets a brain scan. During a lab meeting in Feburary, my supervisor shared that she thought I was ready to conduct a scan. I was very nervous taking the lead in such an important task but nonethless I was excited to try something new. I shadowed our MRI techs and my supervisor multiple times, but doing it on my own was much different than anything I witnessed. I had forgotten the lines that I was supposed to tell the child in the MRI and made a few mistakes while running the tests. Although I felt awful for making so many mistakes, my supervisor and the MRI techs were very patient with me. I consider this a success because I learned and accomplished something new. I'm still practicing how to run the child portion of a visit, but it's wonderful experience. This experience taught me that learning new things require patience and practice. Althought I was frustrated, that does not mean I should give up. In the future I will be learning how to operate new things and those things will require my patience and practice.
Challenges
2. I am in charge of our lab's social media posts; we tend to post on universal and national holidays. I usually have to find information that relates to our lab's work AND the holiday. Sometimes I am unable to find the specific stats and information that relates to both the holiday and lab. For example, on National Stress Awareness Day I couldn't find the exact statistics of stressors besides school. When facing hurdles I cannot handle alone, I would typically consult my supervisor. She would give me advice and suggest what sites I could use. In the end, my team and I had to improvise and decided to just include one type of stressor children face. In the future, I believe I will continue to seek out help from my supervisor and ask for her opinion on our posts. It's better to have another person's insight when researching topics. Creating a specific research question and honing it over time was one of the most important lessons I took away. Additionally, I developed the ability to assess sources for relevance and credibility, which strengthened my points on each post. I know that in the future I will continue using this skill for when writing research projects.
Recently, I've had some trouble with using our labs Outlook. It is a part of my task to call and book MRI scans for our participants. I was able to put the visit on our team's calendar on Outlook, but I had some difficulties booking rooms for our study visit. Through Outlook we book rooms at the neuroscience labs, but I wasn't able to see whether or not our bookings went through. Typically, when I run into a techinical issue that my supervisor cannot answer, I contact the IT workers. They help with troubleshooting issues and assisting with PC errors. I had never interacted with the people who worked at IT beforehand, but because of my internship I would have to contact them relatively frequently. In the future, I will continue to rely on IT services for when I cannot solve certain technical issues.
I am someone who works best with visual learning, so it's a little difficult for me to understand how a task should be done efficiently without being shown what to do. When I was tasked to code the data we collected from our surveys, I wasn't exactly sure how I was supposed to do that. I read the instructions, but applying that knowledge was something I struggled with. I communicated my issues with my supervisor and we set up a date to meet in person so that she could show me how to do it. This was so much more helpful since I was able to practice this task in person and show her if I had done it right. My supervisor always reminds me that we are a team so it's okay to rely on each other. Especially since I had not had any experience with this before.