Semester 2 Blog 1

What are the big ideas that you are taking from internship into the next steps in your life?

The relationships I've formed are opportunities, esteemed individuals like Dr.Weinreb have expectations of me that I should strive to meet. And now that I know what I enjoy a little more, I am able to pursue it clearly, this means more internships and contacting pharmaceutical companies.

What are your plans for the coming semester?

Get enough sleep, complete my work, and pursue real world opportunities that have a larger impact on my life.

Final Internship Blog

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?

Nowadays it's not what you know but who you know (but knowing is still important too.) I'm extremely thankful for the connections I made made through this one the distinguished doctors who doesn't let people have vacations after their dad dies, and gives old pizza to his co-workers... is buying fresh pizza for my presentation. As my mentor puts it: "WHOA You're on the fresh pizza level!" I've made a contact with a scientist and I have opportunities through my mom's patients.

The experience of being able to be in a work environment and being able to work in a lab is amazing. I appreciate my mentor being incredibly nice and supportive, although now I don't want to be a programmer I do know a few skills I can take and use in other applications. Being a programmer is a very tedious and painstaking process and sometimes you're not appreciated as much as you deserve to be. But My skills as an IT are very much applicable to everyday life assuming you are in contact with people and a computer is around.

Internship post 3

You are half-way through your project. How is it going? What challenges have you faced? What have you learned? What are you doing to ensure a successful completion of your internship project.

Funny you should ask, I pretty much completed it, in a sense the websites are ready for the research teams. It's just that in the months of warning they never really got their content ready. So, it's just become a waiting game. I've also completed a few tutorials and how to's for the IT department. A big challenge I faced was the learning curve that comes with programming, it's difficult to retain what you've learned unless it's actually needed for the project. I've learned a bit about php and html but not nearly enough to write a full script without referencing. Since I completed my project I've been talking with my mentor to polish it and work on other smaller tasks until the content is produced.

Choose your favorite photos from your photo essay—post these highlight photo and a caption explaining what we see and what makes this significant to you.

This is the master key I have to carry around if I leave my office, it's attached to a 300 lb resistance bike shock by a cut usb cable. I always get the weirdest stares when I carry it around.

This is the "thinking cap" the bulb lights up the fan spins, and so does Jackie Chan. Because every good idea begins with Jackie Chan. That Jackie Chan came from my birthday cake when I was little.

This is the hallway to the closest bathroom, I drink too many liquids and frequently visit it. Coincidentally it is one of the most quiet hallways, and they laid down this annoying sheet of plastic for some reason. Every time you make a step it sounds like sizzling bacon.

Internship post 2

What limitations have you recognized in yourself that you want to overcome, or use this experience to help you overcome?

I noticed I learn slowly without direction, and I need to pick up on PHP and HTML web programming fairly fast. But what does help is using a project as a tool to give me direction. Such as having my own website, theres coding I can practice on and start small projects for it http://www.algorythmzsd.com/ I am hoping by maintaining this website and continuing to modify it I can teach myself these important skills.

How do you see your role as a working professional in the future? (entrepreneur, employee, freelance, etc).

I see myself doing a lot of benchwork, I like to make things and follow procedures. At internship I was surprised to have an opportunity to shadow one of the researchers in her lab. I had the opportunity to run a gel electrophoresis to help in the process of genotyping mice. Compared to what I do in my office I enjoyed this much more and I would love to run lab procedures every day if I could. But I also had the opportunity to be a salesman as I procured some beats by dre tour earbuds from an office mate and was commissioned to sell them. Lesson: customers are skeptical, I spent many hours convincing potential buyers that my products were not chinese clones. That forced me to do a lot of research and put in a lot of effort to do that. And I didn't want to spread false marketing, as it would affect my reputation. So there's always that balance between marketing your product in an appealing way but it's risky to sacrifice reputation for money (although people do it all the time).

Internship post 1

What are you excited about, nervous about and wondering about?

I'm excited about working towards a product that's going to be viewed and used by distinguished individuals and thousands of people, as well as contributing to a real work environment. I am nervous about not being able to study to prepare myself for when school starts up again, and even worse not being able to pick up on php and html web programming. I'm mostly wondering on what's going to happen after internship, I'm not really confident in the school's math system and I've been anxious about that. I think ALEKS is a good practice module, but leaving it to teach us? It's really affected my will to learn and schedule. Papers and textbooks are much easier to prioritize than a website that is very one-sided in explanations. I also wonder what would have happened if I got another internship, things like would I be competent enough, what kind of learning curve would there be, what new opportunities would have opened up?

Describe the project you'll do at internship, including the skills and technology you need to do it and what you hope your project looks like as a final product.

My main project is to configure 3 websites for 3 different research groups. I'll need some knowledge in php and html programming and be familiar with wordpress, apache, mysql, and filezilla. Hopefully the sites turn out to be clean and streamlined, and more aesthetic than our competitors' sites, I am working on this with a very knowledgeable person and we should pull through.