I wake up to the misty chill of an Inner Richmond morning.  I walk from the guest cottage where I sleep to the neighboring house to listen to eggs sizzle on the stove.  After packing up my lunch for the day, I load my things onto my bike and start the trek to work.  I’m interning at a nonprofit in downtown San Francisco, and I live in a residential part of the city near the charming, foggy Golden Gate Park.  I bike through the park, down a bike path called The Wiggle, and onto busy Market Street.  Though my commute starts with the gentle dappled light of the Panhandle, it finishes in the brisk, swanky financial district.  I squeeze my bike into the elevator and prop it in a corner of the office while I change into business casual attire, trying to match my bosses’ wardrobes of slacks, nice jeans, skirts,
and blouses with sweaters or blazers.

The other Undergraduate Intern and I have desks in the entrance area.  Everyone in the office uses Skype chat communicate, so before I check in verbally with someone on an assignment I Skype them asking if it’s a good time.  Each week, we have a conference Skype call with another staff member and a law fellow in the South Asia office.  The law fellows and interns listen to get a gist of the cases and take turns updating the team on what we’ve been doing in the past week. 

For most of the summer I worked on research memos.  I read reports from cases and summarized the relevant aspects in a legal memo format.  Sometimes I had a lot of trouble reading through ‘Legalese’ documents to find useful information.  By the end of an assignment, I learned a lot about each case, and after a round or two of detailed feedback I felt capable of compiling a clear, useful memo.  My favorite part of memo assignments was when a supervisor explained the context of the memo by sharing the progress and history of the case.

It was inspiring and challenging to see the AC team’s conscientiousness on every level of the work.  My favorite assignment of the summer was to prepare materials for major edits to the organization’s new promotional video.  The Executive Director of AC talked me through the video and which parts they wanted to change.  I was delighted when she paused the video after two seconds: “We’re changing that text from ‘Who will speak for them?’ to ‘As they raise their voices in the face of abuse—who is listening?’  We don’t speak for our clients.  They speak for themselves.”  The edits they had planned produced a video of a completely different framework, from a sob-story charity model to a refreshing and unique advocacy approach.  My assignment entailed sifting through thousands of photos of cases for the best images to fit with particular parts of the video.  I observed that my boss was careful to not take up too much space and to emphasize the power of community members to choose how to proceed.  She was clear about the services that AC did and did not offer (AC supports communities in a complaint process for access to remedy rather than litigation), and when talking separately to women who had been sexually abused, she was clear that each women could choose whether or not to share their experiences with the complaint investigators, acknowledging that they may not feel safe.

My first office job confirmed that I like group work more than individual and that I love creative work.  Trust in the workplace made me comfortable; I trusted the organization, its mission, and the other team members to make smart and conscientious choices, and I was trusted to update the website, hear case updates in staff meetings and in-office eavesdropping (which was explicitly welcomed), and send emails on behalf of AC.  We could arrive and leave work when it worked best for us—I got an office key—so I could plan for a safer bike commute to avoid traffic and take a lunch break whenever I needed it.  The level of respect for everyone in the (all female!) team was amazing, and the work centered on respecting the rights and choices of people negatively affected by neoliberal power structures.

This summer I was so fortunate to intern with the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Fellowships and Internships (OFI) in Washington D.C. Through my internship I was able to get a first-hand view of what the general public cannot see, which consists of the inter-departmental network of various divisions that comprise the Smithsonian Institution. I valued my behind the scenes perspective viewing the Smithsonian and its many museums as a whole. I now have a great sense of how these museums are organized through their many departments all cooperating together.

During my time at OFI I acquired many new relevant skills including data entry analysis in Microsoft Access, content creation for the WordPress Smithsonian OFI blog, event planning for the various internship programs, communication skills with internal office staff, and external phone-based customer service questions. I participated in weekly staff meetings, drafted award and extension letters for various Smithsonian Institution appointments, created OFI newsletters, helped brainstorm for the OFI Exit Survey, digitized academic appointment files, updated online content for the Katzenberger Art History Internship Program, and planned videos for parting intern interviews.

I also had the opportunity to work closely with various internship programs that I helped manage including the Minority Internship Program, Katzenberger Art History Internship Program, and the Project Search Internship Program. I was tasked to track the progress of other interns so as to update their internship program’s online content and requirements. As a direct result of my cross departmental work, I saw my communication skills improve.

One of my a-ha moments that took place during my internship this summer was when I attended a naturalization ceremony at the National Museum of American History. Only a select few of Smithsonian employees and staff were allowed to enter. I knew that the event was displaying the recently conserved and original Star Spangled Banner Flag, which seen flying over Fort McHenry in the Baltimore Harbor during the Battle of Baltimore of the War of 1812. It was this very flag that inspired the national anthem of the United States. As I was waiting for the ceremony to begin, I saw Hilary Clinton walk through the museum lobby, in addition to the Smithsonian Institution Secretary, and Ralph Lauren who donated to the conservation of the flag, as well as other officials. Hearing the former First Lady of the United States discuss the importance of art conservation, in reference to the Star Spangled Banner Flag was extremely inspirational. She discussed the importance of this national symbol of America and how its preservation was essential in remembering the foundation of our country. Hearing about the intersection of cultural heritage and art preservation made me realize the importance of the field of art conservation, which I am considering studying. It was a day I don’t think I could ever forget.

My time in Washington D.C. was a pivotal experience and one that I owe to Scripps for providing. I cannot be more grateful to Ms. Barbara Bice for funding my experience at the Smithsonian through the Barbara Bice Internship in Public Interest. Without my Internship Grant, I would have been extremely difficult to afford the costs of my learning opportunity, so thank you again to both Scripps College and Ms. Bice for funding my fantastic internship this past summer!

Below is a video that showcases my internship experience at the Smithsonian. I helped create this video documentation from OFI, which was the first of its kind. I worked with my fellow interns to create questions and used my video editing skills for this project, which showcases other interns who are part of the Smithsonian Institution as well.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByWB4L5hzS6MdFNWTVpnbzAzNFU/edit?usp=sharing

A link to my online blogging work and website content I created for the Smithsonian Office of Fellowships and Internships: http://www.smithsonianofi.com/

Thanks to a generous grant from the Laspa family, I had the opportunity to spend my summer working in Yale University’s Psychology Department as an intern for Cognition and Development Lab.  I sought out this internship because it offered the chance to experience an intensive research environment and develop many skills important to an academic and researcher.  This opportunity filled my summer with opportunities to glimpse day-to-day life of a graduate student, as well as provide opportunities to strengthen my skills as a researcher.

My internship allowed me to experience all parts of research in developmental psychology.  Starting on day one, I was already cold calling families in order to secure participants for ongoing studies, who I would later help run through stimuli to gather data.  By the end of my first week, my co-workers and I had already developed and illustrated the first iteration of stimuli for a new study. Throughout the next few weeks, we were responsible for collecting the data for the same study. My research group’s regular trips to museums (the optimal location for gathering child participants and data) gave me invaluable amounts of experience interacting with child participants.  Dealing with the idiosyncratic explanations of a five-year-old can only be learned through the ample practice, as I learned from gathering data three times a week this summer.

Because of the high exposure my internship offered to participants, I also had the chance to focus on many studies and projects, not just repeat one procedure or task endlessly for eight weeks.  Instead, my days were mixed between developing online adult pilot studies, creating stimuli for children’s studies and analyzing and discussing our collected data relating to studies that varied in topic from children’s understanding of medicine’s efficacy in the body to understandings of how people gain knowledge and learn new things.  This variety kept my days interesting and prevented my days from involving simple rote memorization of experiment procedures or organizing and analyzing data endlessly. Even within our data collection trips, different families’ or children’s responses or behavior during our studies allowed for discussions of different issues or trends in the data, instead of just watching the same pattern of child behavior repeat itself daily without variation. 

I was most surprised by how much more prepared I feel to begin my senior thesis because of this internship.  Being able to observe all of the ‘tricks of the trade’ my lab used to engage with families of young children gave me a very strong blueprint of what does and does not work for collecting participants.  Various members of my lab group also offered to share and recommend resources and recruitment strategies should I need them throughout my thesis process, which really demonstrates to me just how collaborative and encouraging of an environment I spent my summer in.

Yale’s Psychology department also offered the unique opportunity for all the lab interns to attend a Professional Development seminar twice a month.  This seminar focused on the reality of applying to, getting into, and attending graduate school.  The program really helped me to reexamine why I want to go to graduate school, what is required of me to get there, and how I am going to go about achieving my goals.

I also got to spend time with real life graduate students.  They were always more than wiling to share their experiences and advice.  Hearing from people who had gone through the experience and lived to tell the tale has given me much more confidence in the fact that not only can I make it, but that with planning and hard work, I absolutely will.  All of these people who came into work every day, ready to do research and pursue knowledge, served as proof that my dream was more than just a dream, it was attainable and I could get there.  I will get there.

During my time working for Council Member Kallos, The Constituent Services Department was the largest of the three departments and was run by Intern Coordinator and Community Liaison Joseph Strong. Working in Constituent Services entails taking calls from constituents, checking the Council Member’s email, or talking directly with constituents who come into the office about problems they are having or issues they want the Council Member to either support or oppose. For each constituent that contacts us, we fill out an intake sheet with their contact information, the issue that they contacted us about, and our plan to resolve it.

Another big part of working in constituent services is writing letters. After a few weeks in the office, this became my job. Every intern had the opportunity to meet one on one with the Council Member twice during the internship and, during my first one on one with Council Member Kallos, he explained to me why writing letters is so important when you’re a Council Member. He asked me, “What do you think the most important part of being an elected official is?” I replied, “Helping people.” He said, “Well, yes. But in order to do that you must get reelected. That’s the most important part. We write letters so that constituents have physical proof of what we’ve done for them. Even if we can’t do anything for them, a letter lets them know that they’re still important to us and we have them in mind.” So, about half of my time in the office was spent drafting letters to different agencies or constituents from Council Member Kallos.

Although it sounds simple, the process of getting a letter approved to go out took, on average, four hours. This is because each letter had to be approved by Debbie Lightbody, which is how she came to be my mentor. Debbie was incredibly supportive during my time in the office and we became close over the course of the two months that I was there. She was constantly encouraging me and praising my work and brought me along to meetings she thought I would be interested in. One meeting she took me to was at the Department Of Transportation headquarters in downtown Manhattan where the Borough Commissioner gave a PowerPoint presentation on how to report problems to the DOT more efficiently. This meeting taught me how detailed and fascinating local government can be in that the presentation outlined things like the difference between a pothole and a sinkhole and that they might seem similar but they’re dealt with my separate departments.

This internship taught me to take initiative and to fill a void where I saw one. I’m proud to have worked for Council Member Kallos because he takes women’s rights very seriously (in fact he insists on being called Council Member rather than Councilman), he is very aware of the income inequality that exists in his own district and is taking measures to try and correct this, and he gives constituents the opportunity to speak with him directly, holding open forums twice a month. I would like to sincerely thank Scripps College for providing the funds that allowed me to partake in this internship. Working for Council Member Kallos has solidified my interest in going into local politics and I hope it is one of many stops on my political career.

Last summer, I spent bits and pieces of my days in an operating room watching cesareans, labia reconstructions, and uterine polyp removals, along with a number of other surgeries. When I wasn’t in the OR, I was fortunate enough to shadow Dr. Lizellen La Follette in her private practice and follow her in the Labor and Delivery ward of Marin General Hospital (MGH) for a many number of vaginal deliveries. So, after discussing vaginal births v. cesareans, and the way that doctors approach a labor, Dr. La Follette and I decided work on a study together that would look at vaginal births after cesareans (VBAC). The study plans to determine if there is an association between epidural use and cesarean section among women who are attempting to VBAC, which is an area of obstetrics that is currently under-researched. We hypothesized that women who receive an epidural will have a different rate of successful VBAC than those who do not receive an epidural.

Though I thought I’d be working side by side with Dr. La Follette all summer, I found myself mostly doing independent research. I worked in the Medical Records Office of Marin General Hospital for hours (5+) at a time reading through old patients’ charts, looking for information we might find useful for the study. I reviewed 14 years of patient data in Marin General Hospital, a general medical and surgical hospital in Greenbrae, California with 235 beds. Ultimately, we had over one thousand charts pulled, and each was very different. Depending on the year, the charts varied in format. Additionally, I had to learn how to read and understand doctors’ notes within the charts and the nurses’ flowsheets. This provided us with a huge amount of data, up to 30 data points per patient researched.

To complete every field of this “mega” excel spreadsheet, I had to sort through pages and pages of notes that were barely legible, decipher acronyms and errors in notes that were taken during the delivery. Some charts would indicate that an epidural had been used, but upon further investigation I would find that the patient had a quick second stage and that the epidural couldn’t be used because of the baby’s rapid descent into the pelvis and vaginal canal.

Ultimately, the work that I was doing this summer was incredibly challenging. I was held to an incredibly high standard since I had already shadowed Dr. La Follette, and I was expected to understand large amounts of information that I had not previously learned. Eventually, I was discussing patient charts with Dr. La Follette on a regular basis, even over the phone, and using terminology that made me think and feel like a doctor. This experience was invaluable, and has been instrumental in reconfirming my desires to attend medical school and study obstetrics and gynecology. Since I was Dr. La Follette’s go-to on this study, and was leading the research, I was constantly learning and required to explain to others, even Dr. La Follette, the direction in which the study was going, and the focus of our findings.

I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to spend my summer working with such unique data that will be at the forefront of OB research. More importantly, Dr. La Follette was an incredible mentor and taught me more about medicine and research than I could have ever hoped. The amount of work that I accomplished is so exciting and I am very proud of how hard I worked and how much I learned.

Finally, none of this could have really been possible without the support and funding that I received from Scripps and its donors. I wouldn’t have been able to accept the position had it not been for the funding that I received, and for that I am grateful.