Looking back at my first blog post, things about the experience were definitely how I expected it to go and, at the same time, somewhat different. It turns out I got a bonus mentor, Dr. MacCallum-Bridges, who was very nice! I also had to swap topics and duties from the original idea of short-interval pregnancies because I wouldn’t be able to get access to the national dataset within a reasonable timeframe. While a bit disheartening, I still enjoyed the other project I was put on. I still got to learn about maternal health, just a very different aspect of it!
I think time was my biggest challenge. Since I had an average of 4 paid hours, sometimes it felt a tad limiting. Throughout the process of learning how to do things better, there was a lot of redoing that ate into those 4 hours and could be disheartening at times, but that is just the way the research progressed. You get back up, learn, and do it better and better each time, and maybe get a little faster next time. I know myself pretty well, and remote work was, as expected, draining sometimes to sit still and look at a screen every day, but I think it was still a valuable learning experience that let me learn about what I could see myself doing in the future.
What empowered me to push through was the desire to finish. I might have had a rocky start, but I wanted to see the experience through, and now that it is almost over, I can take the information into other things like school work or other research opportunities. My advice for other UROP students: I can’t say for certain about those who do lab work, but for those doing completely remote work, I think two team meetings are actually a good thing. One on Monday or Tuesday and then Friday, so you can get corrections if you work over the weekend and don’t lose that time when your mentor points something out where you could improve or do something different.