Category: Student Perspective

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Britney Firmin, COL ’20

This summer I had the opportunity to intern for the Rachael Rollins for District Attorney campaign. This internship experience provided me with in depth exposure to grassroots organizing, allowing me to connect with various communities while passionately spreading Rachael’s campaign message of equity and justice. As an intern with the field team, I was able to converse with prospective voters about the importance of not only the District Attorney race in Massachusetts, but in the central role that the District Attorney plays in shaping our criminal justice system. My daily canvass shifts prompted me to passionately discuss how Rachael is a candidate who is slated to drive tangible social change. When attending debate forums, I gained firsthand insight into the various platforms of the DA candidates, and in the process was able to understand the various social issues that concerned voters throughout the city of Boston.

In addition to passionately communicating Rachael’s platform to voters in person, I additionally honed in on my communication skills by participating in weekly phone banks at campaign headquarters. Not only did this allow me to connect with voters about the issues that they especially care about, but it also informed me on the types of issues that the District Attorney is charged with addressing through the establishment of central policies. Having the opportunity to intern with such an important campaign gave me additional insight into how progressive reform can be brought to the city of Boston. I additionally participated in various community events with the campaign team, including cultural parades and a fundraiser all in an effort to garner additional support amongst voters.

This internship opportunity reinforced my passion for local politics and organizing. In my ability to have direct contact with voters, I learned about the power and value vested in grassroots organizing efforts. I also worked with the policy team on drafting and editing Rachael’s central policies that was disseminated to various voters. In my ability to research key areas to be included in her platform, I was informed on social issues that currently affect Boston and all of Suffolk County. In doing so, I became further immersed in the significance of such a pivotal District Attorney race. Having never worked for a campaign, I gained firsthand experience into the daily operations that drive the success of a given candidate. Canvassing shifts, phone banking sessions, and policy research is involved in much of the behind the scenes work that drives the momentum of a campaign. Working for this campaign has additionally connected me with inspiring individuals who are just as passionate about bringing true and progressive change to Suffolk County. In rallying behind such a pivotal leader whose mission is to provide a voice to various communities, I am empowered to harness my own leadership skills when it comes to spreading significant political messages. I am beyond appreciative of receiving financial support for this internship. Working for a campaign has provided me with groundbreaking exposure to local politics, with invigorating my interest in utilizing law as a tool for social change.

 

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Ken Yanagisawa, COL ’20

This summer, I worked as a systems analyst at a local nonprofit clinic in San Jose, California called Asian Americans for Community Involvement (AACI). In the Silicon Valley, the cost of living has risen, and many struggle to make ends meet, let alone seek healthcare. AACI aims to promote community wellbeing by providing affordable health care to the community, especially to the underserved. Financial resources are tight for a nonprofit health clinic, so I am thankful to receive Penn Career Service’s summer internship grant and am grateful to the donors who have made this summer internship experience possible.

As a computational biology major, I believe it to be important to learn skills in data analytics, and at this internship, I learned to work with a health records database in SQL. I studied SQL through online resources and applied what I learned with the real-world database. Working with a live database provided me with valuable insight that I would not have been able to gain from just learning SQL online.

I learned through experience that though there are best practices in how to design a SQL query script, sometimes the database design requires analysts to sacrifice efficiency. The clinic I work at uses NextGen’s proprietary electronic health record system. Because we are not provided with a database schema or data dictionary, the lead systems engineer, the other systems analyst, and I must figure out on our own how to access the relevant data values. Therefore, sometimes the query scripts we create employ SQL functions that are not considered best practice but allow us to create a viable work around solution for our situation.

Furthermore, querying data from a database has also taught me to consider other perspectives to data. One of my projects that I worked on created a SQL report of behavioral health patient discharge reasons. The electronic medical record form that the providers use at the clinic are provided by the county government. The data values it provides to the database are unintuitive, so I asked to understand the workflow of the providers, or how the data is being inputted and what the providers are trying to convey with those inputs. This gave me insight in how the electronic form behaves and what inputs are possible, allowing me to design a SQL query that best portrays what the providers meant when discharging the patient. My final product will help management understand the performance of their behavioral health center and how behavioral health patients improve.

Working in SQL and databases is a valuable skill in data analytics, and I hope to build upon the skills and experience I have gained from this internship. I have already started to see how I can combine SQL with Python to add a deeper analysis of the data. This internship has given me a solid skill base to pursue more opportunities in data science and analytics in the future. Thank you again to Penn Career Services and the donors for making this summer internship possible.

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Matthew Hanna, MSE ’19

I want to start this reflection off by thanking career services for funding my summer. The money I was awarded helped me out so much, as without it I would not have been able to cover the cost of rent and expenses while living and working in Philadelphia. As a FGLI student, opportunities like this are not available very often, and so I did my very best to maximize the experience and use the funds optimally.

This summer, I spent my time in Philadelphia developing my startup, InstaHub. We developed a light-automation device that installs on top of the existing light switch, eliminating the need for replacement and professional installation. I acted as an engineering lead, working to bring several technical components of our product to life, such as a portion of the device that gathers data for the customer; I also assisted heavily on power management of the device.

We iterated on each prototype at NextFab, a community makerspace located in South Philly. Each day, I spent 6-7 hours at the facility designing, checking, redesigning, and checking again as we made progress. The work was hard, tedious at some points, but ultimately being in the space with my other co-founders fueled our growth and bought us closer together as a team. It forced me to communicate in a clear way, which is something I’ve always struggled with. You don’t truly know yourself or what you stand for until you’re forced to reflect and admit when you’re wrong for the sake of team chemistry. These lessons mean the world to me and I will carry them through my career.  And even better, we made clear progress on bringing our product forward.

Being an entrepreneur is by far the most difficult career path I’ve chosen because of how demanding it is and how much sacrifice is required. This was the first summer I was able to focus solely on my business, and the funding was critical for making that a reality. Ultimately, it is not the sales or design experience that I will take away from this past summer, but it is more the independence that I gained. It is an independence that fueled me to try things that scare me – like starting a company, cooking new dishes, or biking alone from South Philly to Chinatown at night (and yes, all of those things happened).

Philly felt like, and still does, a home for me this summer. I look back at the time I spent and take the entire experience with a deep joy – joy that I could explore my passions and build a company and career, all while bonding with my friends in the area as well. Ultimately, it is not what we do that matters, but the connections we make and how we maintain them that give us meaning. The icing on the cake is that I’ve successfully integrated “jawn” into my vocabulary.

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Carson Kahoe, COL ’19

My internship in Dubai with Alserkal Avenue offered me an improbably perfect combination of my two great interests in college. As an arts and culture organization dedicated to creating a hub for artists from all across the region, the Avenue catered both to my major in Modern Middle Eastern Studies and my minor in Fine Arts. What’s more, living in Dubai offered me an opportunity to immerse myself in the Gulf region, practice my Farsi with the many Iranians living in Dubai, and gain an appreciation for its culture firsthand by living in it every day. Sadly, since Dubai is known for its luxury hotels and flashy skyline, I feared that the cost would keep me from experiencing the city on the level I hoped I could. However, the funding from Career Services freed me from worrying about cab and dinner fares and let me focus more on exploration and experience.

Exploring Dubai’s neighborhoods almost every weekend, I gained an appreciation for the city on foot. I would pick a destination and wander from there. Though the heat proved prohibitive during the day—120 degrees and nearly 100% humidity—I connected most with the city on the nights by taking the metro to a neighborhood, walking to a nearby restaurant I wanted to visit, and then wandering the nearby stores. Using that method, I had conversations with shopkeepers, bought a book from the owner of a neat secondhand bookstore, and befriended a barber while watching a Philippino bodybuilding show. I also visited Dubai’s neighboring emirate to the north, Sharjah, to visit the Sharjah Art Foundation, explore the city, and spend the evening on the beach.

Having the freedom to travel also allowed me to take full advantage of the city’s linguistic opportunities. Given the United Arab Emirate’s proximity to Iran, Dubai has a large Iranian community. On weekends, I would sometimes travel to the city’s bazaar neighborhood in the north and speak Farsi with the Iranian saffron store owners. On the recommendation of my landlady, I also met one Iranian woman for lunch and quickly became her friend. I had the privilege of seeing her several times while I was in Dubai and meeting her family. As a parting gift, she gave me a book of letters from the modern giant of Persian poetry, Forough Farrokhzad.

That freedom allowed me to take advantage of the region as a whole as well. To renew my visa, I had to exit and reenter the country, so I took the opportunity to catch the cheapest flight out of Dubai and spend a weekend in another country. As a result, I spent the holiday weekend at the end of the holy month of Ramadan in Muscat, the capital of Oman, where I met people on the beaches and enjoyed the atmosphere as families all around me cooked holiday dinners. Ultimately, as someone who studies the Gulf region and hopes to use an understanding of it in a future career in diplomacy or academia, the opportunity to experience my time in Dubai fully was priceless. Getting over my fear of cab fares got me out of my room and allowed me to see beyond Dubai’s shiny towers and get to know it on a deeper, more personal level.

 

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Sia-Linda Lebbie, COL ’21

Thanks to the funding I received from Career Services, I am blessed to say that I have been able to give back to a community that raised me and made me the person that I am today. I come from Salem, Massachusetts, a small city that is just outside of Boston. Salem has a growing immigrant community, predominately hailing from the Dominican Republic. Many of the adolescents in this community have lower reading comprehension and test scores. This is primarily due to their families not having the funds to provide extracurricular activities and enriching summer programs.

The non-profit I interned for this summer, LEAP for Education, provides just what this community needs: free after-school and summer programming for low-income and/or first-generation students. LEAP, as we refer to it, provides programming in Salem, Peabody and Gloucester, all local cities, to nearly seven hundred students. Their programs range from an after-school Teen Center to a Zero Robotics coding summer coding competition.

This year Salem High School and Salem State University are partnering with LEAP to run an Early College program. This program will allow fifty Salem High students to take college classes their Junior and Senior years of high school, graduate with four college credits, and if all their courses are passed, the students will receive early admission to Salem State. This program is free-of-charge for all of the students involved, even their textbooks are provided.

Salem State provides the classes, Salem High the students, and LEAP provided the summer college readiness seminar, which I primarily worked on. I worked with five empowering women at LEAP to create learning materials for our program. I made phone calls to students and parents, registered them for one of the two tracks available, ensured that they had turned in their Dual Enrollment forms, and reminded them to show up once the dates drew near.

I also developed lesson plans, such as my Outlining and Study Skills lessons, two of which I modeled after the skills that I had gained at Penn. Throughout the seminar, I was a LEAP instructor that helped teach one of the classes. I was fortunate enough to work with two phenomenal women who have a passion for educating populations that mainstream society deems “unworthy.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this summer because I was able to learn a lot. I learned how to create curriculum that is catered to first-generation students. I learned that behind every successful non-profit, is a team of people who work relentlessly to create long-lasting impact. I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity Career Services was able to give me. Due to their funding, I was able to not worry about finances and bring my full attention to LEAP’s endeavors. I am also grateful for the LEAP staff for welcoming me with open arms. They gave me a responsibility that was able to mold me into someone who works efficiently with teams to execute a successful venture, a skill set I had not developed before. I will take these skills with me wherever I go.