Blog Post #3: Overcoming Obstacles

So far, I’ve been very happy with my experience at the Institute of Medicine in DC. My supervisor and I get along well, and she is always clear about what I can change or improve. Based on Rachel’s (my supervisor) feedback up to this midway point, I think I’ve done a good job staying on top of my various assignments and making changes to them as necessary, i.e. adding citations or modifying graphs if new data becomes available.

The assignment with which I was most pleasantly surprised was my work on natural disaster data, something I worked on during my first two weeks. I wouldn’t describe myself as an Excel genius, so categorizing the data and organizing it into charts proved to be an early challenge. However, I was very pleased with the final product and I actually enjoyed working with the data in order to produce a tangible and usable final product that proved to be valuable background information for the study on which I was working.

One area I’d like to improve is in my informal communication of progress. Often when Rachel asks me for updates, I fumble in explaining exactly what I’ve been doing. Especially if my assignments are research-based, I sometimes feel as though I have nothing to report if the research leads to a dead end. In this case, I need to do a better job leaving tracks for myself and recording my own progress as I go in order to give better feedback to my supervisors. An example of this came up when I was working on a report for the disaster response study. I forgot to include citations for some of my notes, so I had to go back and find the information again in order to report it to Rachel. Moving forward, I hope to be meticulous in tracking my research.