Blog Post #5: Concluding Thoughts on Working at the IOM

I really enjoyed my internship at the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC this summer. I worked there for approximately six weeks, broken up at the halfway point for a trip abroad. My LSA education actually helped me immensely in a lot of the work I did there, because most of it revolved around research and writing. For the first half of the internship I researched community disaster recovery, essentially conducting a literature review on the topic. As a history major I’ve gained a lot of experience at Michigan conducting research for papers, blogs and essays. That experience helped me navigate research databases and search websites when conducting research for the IOM. The second half of my internship centered around more research but also included a lot of writing, as I was responsible for producing two to three case study write ups each week. The writing experience and skills I’ve gained through my LSA education benefitted me in those tasks, too.

One of my most surprising tasks at the IOM was data analysis. I’m not so experienced in producing and analyzing data through Excel, but that was one of my most important assignments during the first half of my internship. Luckily I’ve gained some experience using Excel through a biological anthropology class I took two years ago and a past internship, but it is not my comfort zone. Using skills I’ve gained from those experiences, I was able to work in Excel well enough (after some troubleshooting) to produce “nice” graphs that were satisfactory for my supervisors.

View from my office window; Verizon Center on the left. 

View from my office window; Heading towards Penn Quarter. 

Overall, I really enjoyed working at the IOM. While I worked independently for large parts of the day, I enjoyed interacting with my supervisors and the other interns I met in the office. I also think the independence granted to me instilled confidence, because it showed that my supervisors trusted my ability to work hard and finish on deadlines. I also love working in the heart of Washington DC next to Penn Quarter, and I hope to return there in the near future whether I get my first job in DC or sometime in the distant future.