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\u2019t really able to give daily reports of what I was doing nor could I pop over to my supervisor\u2019s 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\u2019t think that I would have had otherwise. Because I wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since this is the official end of my internship (although I still plan to be involved with the Center for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4832,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4832"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}