Day 6

Day 2 with Valssis Digital

Today was my second and last day with Valassis Digital. I started off the day going over all the research I did and finding things to expand upon and clarify. Then for the next couple hours I worked to finish up the spread sheets. My boss scheduled a lunch for all of us in the Business Development Department so food was brought it and we all go the opportunity to sit down and talk about anything. It was very interesting and reassuring to learn the journeys my coworkers went through as well as how much/ how long it took them to realize what they wanted to do as a career. Also it was comforting to learn that your major doesn’t define the career you will go into, as one coworker majored in history and was then a consultant and now works at Valassis Digital. After lunch I had completed all my designated work so I got to do research about social influencers and the companies that manage and connect social influencers to the company trying to promote the product. It was a nice experience having a coworker give me and trust me to do completely new work just like in a real job. It was also so rewarding seeing my work be used in a professional manner. This experience was great and although working with Dragonwing was awesome, I appreciate that it gave a more realistic look at a sort of job I might have in the future.

Today, we went to the Frontier, a place in the research triangle park, because he had a meeting. There were many workplaces to work in while he was in his meeting. I continued analyzing data checking for correlation as well as doing some research for a doctor who works for the company. I also learned a bunch of techniques on excel to complete my tasks more efficiently. I had lunch at a food truck and continued working on this stuff into the afternoon. I helped Zach out with creating a formula for determining characteristics for a patient based on other information. Overall, it was a fun day and I am looking forward to tomorrow!

Day 6

Today was our sixth day at Field2base. As always, we began our day by attending the stand-up meeting. After stand-up, we were given an assignment to have a region on a form output the time zone for any United States Zip Code that a user could input. After trying various API options with no success, I had the idea of finding an excel spreadsheet with all this data contained within it. After getting this functioning, I realized that daylight savings time would be an issue that could make this not work correctly during about half of the calendar year. Due to this issue, I had to essentially start completely over in my approach but luckily the spreadsheet I had already found did contain this data. I spent the rest of the morning coding the form to correctly find the date and check whether daylight savings time was active, and if it was, take it into account. Once I had this all set up it was time for lunch. After lunch Milen and I attended the development team’s meeting in review of their seventh “sprint,” which is a term for a two week period of progress using the Agile methodology. I am looking forward to my next and final two days at Field2Base!

Day 6- Voir Dire

My 6^th day, I got to watch my first jury trial. Jury trials only happen in Superior court, so I headed up to the 4^th floor and parked myself in room 401 with Judge Collins. I was with a law intern who was blind and his guide dog Howard. The lady plead not guilty, so they had to bring in 36 jurors and begin voir dire. Voir dire is the process of jury selection where they ask jury members questions in order to determine whether or not a juror will be neutral in the trial. Halfway through the trial, after vior dire the clerk looked up the defendant’s record state-wide. She found out that the lady had 3 outstanding warrants for arrest on her record, and so Judge Collins had her served for the warrants right then and there.

In the afternoon, I learned about the organization of the files and paperwork done by clerks. “Shucks”, or the folders they keep peoples’ trial paperwork in come in 4 different colors: gray, white, brown, and yellow. Grey is for a simple traffic infraction, white I for misdemeanors, brown is for major traffic infractions, and yellow is for DWI.

Day 6: Day 1 of the Symposium

Today we started out by unfolding a lot of chairs and setting everything up for Day 1 of the 2017 Dementia & Museums Symposium at the Nasher. The Keynote speaker was incredibly compelling. His name is Damon McLeese and he works a lot with people who have disabilities and diseases that prevent them from getting normal jobs. He uses art to unlock the person they are behind the disability or disease that society only sees. It was inspiring to watch somebody so passionate be here in North Carolina at this museum in Durham. It made me feel confidant. That if these people can succeed so can I. I am so thankful to be experiencing this during my work experience.

Day 6 – Black Out

Today was a little more slow than my other days, but it was still fun nonetheless. I again got to observe the e-cigarette tester in action (even got to press the buttons myself!!!:) I had a really good chat with one of the lead scientists on the project, Dr. Cho, and she updated me on her other projects she works on. She also explained how her interdisciplinary research for her PhD helped her career and led to the diversity of projects she is able to work on at RTI (which is definitely relevant to my interests so super useful advice).

The day got a little wild after that. While touring one the analytical labs in another building, the power went out!!! It was actually tragic for a lot of the mass spectrometers that were running at the time and even more tragic for the people running the experiments. But it wasn’t just for that one building; almost all of the buildings across RTI’s campus had no power and only two were running on backup generators. EXCEPT for Building 11, the building I work in, so I did not have to suffer through the blackout.

My afternoon did not go according to plan. Originally, I was going to observe lung cells getting exposed to different types/concentrations of “vape juice”, but the necessary supplies did not come in time. So, we changed the plan so that I would go to a lab and look at lung cells that had been already exposed under a microscope and take pictures — but the power outage decided to kill that plan too. So I worked on checking more MicroPEMs and did some more research for my mini-project on biosensors. While it was not the most exciting day because of the various setbacks, I still learned a lot — including how extra creepy power outages are in labs. Looking forward to (hopefully) looking at the cells tomorrow and continuing the e-cigarette work!

DAY 6: Smoking Doesn’t Kill!

Without context, a lot of things can be unclear. I’ve found that this principle holds especially true in the world of medical research. The research conducted by the Sheikh lab uses various biological samples, such as tissue, serum, individual cells. However, the one thing that binds all of these types of samples together is where they come from: a sick patient. Understanding the patient’s illness is just as important as understanding the sample that they provide us. So, on Tuesday afternoon, the entire Sheikh lab got together to hear Dr. Sheikh give a clinical talk briefly outlining the two main types of inflammatory bowel disease that the lab’s research is aimed towards.

Both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis have genetic, immunological and microbial factors that contribute to a given patient’s susceptibility; however, it usually takes an environmental factor to trigger a patient into actually contracting the disease. Essentially, there’s currently no way to predict if a person will get either disease because there’s no directly linked cause. Furthermore, it’s hard to pinpoint one of these diseases exactly in a diagnosis because the symptoms that patients have aren’t solely limited to the gastrointestinal tract. The elusive cause and the difficult diagnosis are just a couple of the reasons why the lab’s research on inflammatory bowel disease is so important.

So, you’re watching the season finale of the Bachelor and you’re about to find out who receives the final rose, and just like that the screen cuts to black and an image of blackened lungs fills the screen with bright red letters forming the blaring message “Smoking Kills”. We’ve all been there (more or less). Something really interesting that I learned in Dr. Sheikh’s talk was that for patients with ulcerative colitis, smoking has actually shown to have beneficial effects in fighting the disease. The nicotine in tobacco helps suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation, essentially countering the disease’s effects on the body head on. So for patients with UC, smoking doesn’t kill, it saves!

Tuesday (day 6)

I was with the David Glenn show. I found a story on one of the guests on the show, and David Glenn read what I wrote about that story on the rundown, live on the radio. It was quite cool. I also learned about radio timing and ad rules, as well as ratings calculations. Like how to be counted as one listener, a person has to be on the channel for 5 consecutive minutes. Video: show recording

Day 6

Alright so today I finally finished creating 3 versions of the dragon boat tshirt. I only like 2 of them, but I was experimenting with a third option. They are all pretty similar:

The third one is cool because the graphic would wrap around the tshirt. The second one is my least fav. though because it’s just really lame. I tried formatting the graphic sideways and it just didn’t work out. So yeah that’s all I really did yesterday except eat lunch, but I didn’t take a picture of that.

Day 6

Today went by much faster than the past two days, as life was breathed back into the General Assembly after a long weekend. However, it was clear very early in the day that it wasn’t going to be an ideal situation, with the AC being broken the whole day. Apparently the part is being shipped from California so hopefully tomorrow it’ll be cooler. Although I had Session, and a few meetings to sit in on, the main highlight of the day was speaking to Mary Beth Wooten, who works at the Department of Health and Human Services over the phone. Like I stated yesterday, Mr. Hailey set up the call when Rep. Martin found out that I had a possible interest in public health. Ms. Wooten began by telling me the difference between public health and just health. That public health was assessing the health of a population, which ranged from communicable diseases to passing laws about smoking in restaurants to the fluoride in the tap water. She explained to me how her experience in clinical practice translates well to her job in DHHS. But she also suggested other ways of becoming a public health professional. She told me about how she works with the various departments within DHHS, such as women and children and epidemiology. She also spoke about how involved the DHHS has to be in politics. With each new healthcare plan comes adjusted funding for their department, so they have to remain vigilant about future legislation, on a national and state level. The DHHS has many lesions to the General Assembly who are advocating for the DHHS. Overall, my conversation with Ms. Wooten was very informative and very interesting to hear about from a person currently working as a public health professional.