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Final Week and COVID effects at the Center for Bioethics and Health Law

Since this is the official end of my internship (although I still plan to be involved with the Center for Bioethics and Health Law for a few more weeks), I wanted to use this last entry to discuss the ways that I feel like my internship has been radically changed by COVID-19. I have no doubt that an in-person pandemic free internship would have been an entirely different experience – in ways that are both good and bad. The most obvious difference to me is that I was never actually in Pittsburgh, and my contact with my site supervisor and other people with whom I was working was really limited to update calls and check-ins over email. I wasn’t really able to give daily reports of what I was doing nor could I pop over to my supervisor’s office with a quick question or even just a chat about what I was learning. When thinking about internships that I have had in the past, I definitely miss the daily interaction of being part of a workplace. However, this lack of daily oversight also gave me great benefits that I don’t think that I would have had otherwise. Because I wasn’t checking in all the time or being closely monitored, I had a lot of freedom to manage my own schedule and work in the way that I knew would make me the most productive. Yes, that sometimes meant that I was listening to music or had a podcast on in the background of my work (something that would no doubt be considered distracting or a sign of a lack of productivity in a more traditional in-person work environment), but I found that it actually helped me to concentrate. I was also able to engage in a lot of work-related opportunities that I would not have been able to experience without the world transitioning to more remote work. For example, I had the opportunity to attend four virtual conferences on ethics, genetics, and the history of pandemic and a host of lecture series that I would have otherwise missed because I would have been in a more traditional office setting. Overall, while I certainly wish that I had been able to meet Dr. Parker in person or go to Pittsburgh, I do think that I still got a summer that was enriching, even if it was in different ways than I expected.