Week 1:
Welcome to Colorado

June 6, 2017

Week 1 has been quite the week. I arrived home from Scotland on Saturday and less than 24 hours later, my mom, brother and I hit the road to Colorado. After some housing mishaps when we first arrived, we finally settled in a hotel right across the street from the Children’s Hospital where I am interning this summer. A few days later, my family left to go back home and I was able to move into my apartment in Denver.

On Monday, I started my internship. The first day was mainly orientation and learning where everything is. I am still trying to learn my way around and getting lost at least once a day. For my internship, I am working with research assistants and a physician, who I meet with on a regular basis.

The project we are working on this summer is to determine if physicians are more likely to prescribe an athlete an opioid for a musculoskeletal injuries than a non-athlete. Most of my week has been focused on researching background information about the opioid epidemic in the U.S. There are still a lot of logistical questions we have to sort out before we can do the analysis of the data or start writing the manuscript. For example, I had to do a lot of research into medical coding and legislature pertaining to the opioid epidemic. Luckily, there is still a lot of data entry to be done first, so we have time before we have to have answers.

Starting next week, I will have my work cut out for me. I will have thousands (up to 14,000!) of patient records to collect data from over the next 9 weeks. So, I’m hoping to be able to get to work soon!

One things that stood out most this past week was how much block plan has prepared me for this internship. Being a science major, I am used to doing lots of background research for lab reports and papers. Thanks to block plan, I have learned to do research in an efficient manner in a short amount of time. Next week, I have to present a study I found to the other interns and research assistants. I had a whole week to find, learn about, and analyze this study. A week is a long time on the block plan. I was able to get it done in just two days!

Finally, Cornell has fine-tuned my critical thinking skills. This is one of the most helpful skills up to this point. I have had to critically think about some limitations our project could have, forseeable problems in our data, and possible solutions to these concerns. While block plan may be stressful, it has already prepared me more than I expected.