Week 2: Internship

Well, I’ve officially been here a week! How is it possible that I am already an eighth of the way done with my internship? Only seven more weeks to finish my personal project, attend lectures, and learn from those around me. It really makes me want to stay here longer.

On Monday, I attended an orientation session for the eight week interns that will be working in the Clinical Center on the Bethesda campus of the NIH. There are probably about 30 or 35 of us total. After that, I was escorted to the department of rehabilitative medicine, where my lab is located. I met my research team, was shown my desk, and put to work.

The primary study that is being conducted out of this lab in a longitudinal multifaceted study following the natural progression of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) over five years using cutting edge neuroimaging techniques along with rehabilitative and psychometric measures. There will be times that I assist with portions of this project: I’m really looking forward to shadowing the neuroradiologist and one of the psychometrists, for example. My main role with this project is to learn all that I can about as many techniques being utilized as I can in my short time here. Any portions I assist on that are ultimately published down the line I will be included as a co-author on, although I will only make minuscule contributions while I’m here.

My primary role for the summer will culminate with my personal project poster presentation, which is required of all summer interns. My lab director plans to have another member of the lab present my poster at a conference next year, and if it is well received it may ultimately result with a small paper publication. All in all, I’m feeling great about it! The lab has been collecting psychological data on all patients in the TBI study, and I will be working with these measures for my study. Primarily, I will be examining a test known as the Rey Tangled Line Test (RTLT): it requires subjects to following a line from a staring point on the left side of the page to an ending point on the right. The line is curved and intersects other lines, and is mildly difficult to follow. Subjects can only follow the line with their eyes, not with a finger or pen. We know that TBI patients with cognitive decline take much longer than control subjects to complete the task, but we don’t really know why; that’s what I’ll be looking at. I have been doing background research all week on the task in other studies (primarily on children with Schizophrenia) and studies examining oculomotor ability in TBI patients. From here, I will correlate RTLT scores with other psychometric test scores, to see if I can find a reasoning for decreased ability on the task. I think this will be a really interesting starting point, allowing me to learn more about these neuropsychological measures and statistics, with lots of directions I can take it in if it does eventually lead to a publishable paper (which I’m very optimistic it will).

For me, the most striking thing about working at the NIH is the astounding availability of resources. While doing my literature search this week, I was shown how to download PDFs of peer reviewed scientific journals via databases, as I commonly do at Wake. However, if a PDF is not available for free online, I can request it through the online NIH library system, and it will be emailed to me at my work station. Any. Paper. I. Want. Because the National Library of Medicine is on this campus; there is no source I don’t have access to. It is unbelievable. I’ve attended at least one lecture every day that I’ve been here, and I have at least one, sometimes as many as four or five, planned for every day I have left. While I am working in a hospital, and we do see patients and it is about the medicine, it is just as much about the education. Everyone here has a thirst for knowledge and a never ending desire to learn. That’s what science is about, finding the new answers. And to do that, you always need to be learning new things. Its an environment that is so easy to thrive in.