• LINK Reflection

  • Discuss skills and abilities coming in to LINK that were most useful (with specific example) 

The most helpful things for me going into the link internship  were really the skills my peers usually say we won’t use outside of school. For my internship I analyzed and found trends in ten years of pika presence data, for this I was required to both have the ability to manipulate a spreadsheet (something we spent a lot of time on in Dave’s sophomore year math class) but I was also required to recognize trends in the data and use there data to make easily understandable graphs a skill I had spent a unit developing with Julian. This just goes to show that math class is useful outside of school.

• Discuss the most important skills developed during LINK (with specific example) 

These were both skills I already had; however, through this experience I was able to further develop them. During my internship because I was on a spreadsheet two of the three weeks I was able to learn new things I had no knowledge of before. I quickly realized that my quick crash course on excel was by no means good for a professional level. My mentor was a very valuable resource and she quickly gave me any knowledge I needed for sorting, filtering, and finding what I needed. However I was more than able to make good graphs, and was able to receive  commendations from my mentors. This being said, I wasn't only able to develop old skills but gained some new ones, our school being a project based school. I was able to pull some things from presentations done at school. However it is my belief I was also able to develop some entirely new presenting skills through this internship. I was able to present my findings in both a scientific paper but I was also able to present my project in front of MSI’s staff at their weekly meeting. This increased my confidence and showed me that my work does mean something in the field I want to work. 

 

• Share how you grew through shortcomings or challenges encountered during LINK 

My internship wasn’t only fun and games though, there was real struggle involved in trying to clean, compile, and present the data.  My main issue when trying to do this project was trying to stay focused. I found it to be extremely difficult to stay focused when I was just staring at a screen for 7 hours a day, overcoming this challenge was the most vital part of my internship. If I hadn’t been able to do this I would not have been able to finish my project on time and I wouldn't have been proud of the work I was able to do through my LINK internship. 

 

• Argue for your importance within the organization and make a case for the mentor to accept high school interns in the future

I can very easily argue for my importance in this instance, I was the first person to ever touch that data in a remotely academic way. They had been wanting to go through the pika data for a long time but didn’t have the manpower to do it. Through this internship I was able to give them the manpower to get this project done and presented. Using this data and my own two hands I wrangled this data and made a presentation capable of educating the greater populace, which was their original goal, that I was able to bring to fruition.

 

• Describe how the internship experience has helped you plan for next steps for college and/or career readiness

This was my first choice for an internship because I have known what I wanted to do since I was 13, this was an illuminating stepping stone on my career path.