Practicum Reflection Essay -- Modify Title to Fit Your Particular Experience

This assignment is to summarize your experience in developing, conducting, and presenting your practicum work. It will help serve you as a reflection of the work you have done, and an aid to future scholars in developing their own practicum projects.

Your report must be a website, linked to your main portfolio page, of approximately 600-900 words length (longer if necessary). Please respond to the prompts below. If you wish to add additional material, however, go ahead.

The Topic:

You have now spent some time in the generation of natural and physical science (working in a research laboratory; doing your own independent research; etc.) or the transmission of natural and physical science (mentoring students in math and/or science; working as a docent in a museum, zoo, or similar institution; etc.) or the application of natural and physical science (working in a medical facility; shadowing a physician, forensic scientist, field hydrologist; curation or preparation of fossils and artifacts in a museum; working as a volunteer behind the scenes at a zoo; etc). Let us know about that experience. In particular, please describe:

Any additional insights or reflections in your essay are welcomed and encouraged.

My practicum site was at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The office is located in Washington D.C, but my position was a remote position. However, I went into the office once. I found this site through my girlfriend’s dad. It is fairly difficult to get an internship in computer science after your freshman year without connections, so I decided to utilize my connections to get an internship. My site supervisor was the person who interviewed me, and she was my direct manager when I was working at AAMC. Her name is Sue Zhang, and she is the Technical Project Manager at AAMC. I would advise future Science and Global Change students to look on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Handshake to find a site to work at in the future. If that does not work, there is nothing wrong with using your connections to get your foot in the door and get an interview. These can be really useful, and could lead to success in your future. At the site, I worked as an Information Systems Engineer Intern on the MCAT IT team. This was a position focused on coding and development, which was useful to me as I am a computer science major. On the job, I was mainly tasked with updating the code for AAMC’s website to make it up to the standards of web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). WCAG are a set of rules that companies should follow in order to make their websites accessible to anyone and everyone. For example, something that I did was add an ‘alt’ tag in the HTML code for every image on the website, so that when a screen reader read all of the text on the website, it would also read out a description for every image. This is useful for people who are visually impaired, and need to use a screen reader because they cannot see the text on the website. I did many tasks similar to this, making the website more accessible to people with disabilities. Another thing I did at this site was learn how a technical team typically operates. At this company, I worked in an Agile work environment. An Agile work environment encourages flexibility and creativity. Every morning, the team has a meeting and explains what they are working on, what needs to be done, and any problems they are facing. In addition, I also learned how to use the JIRA ticketing system that many technical teams use. This system allows the business teams to submit problems and ideas to change the company’s applications, and the IT team receives these problems in “tickets” and solve any problem the business team finds. This allows the IT team to have easy access to know what to work on. I learned many other technical skills that will be useful to me in the future, but those are some examples. In addition, I gained a lot of appreciation for the practical connections between science and other parts of society. Before this, I had never done a technical internship. Now, I see the impact and how useful computer science is. A company that has a website that needs to be constantly updated will always need an IT team, and I understand how important an IT team is to a company now. Without an IT team, no one will know what to do if the website crashes or is malfunctioning. This science is applicable in almost every company in the world, and my internship has really shown me the importance science has. Based on this experience, I have decided to take a web development class next semester, because I have realized that it is something that I am very interested in. This internship was my first real experience in web development (as SGC gives us templates), and I really enjoyed it. In turn, my future career plans now include possibly doing web development when I graduate.

Last modified: 05 May 2023