Hi all,

This was our last week of the ProHealth REU and I just want to say I had an amazing summer! I want to give a special thanks to everyone who is associated with the ProHealth REU for providing me with a tier 1 research experience along with a fun and exciting summer! In today’s post I will be addressing an updated timeline, our finalized video/poster/paper, my overall research experience, my plans for the future, and much more.

Updated Timeline:

Key: Things that were slightly changed in the timeline are in italics.

Week 1: Get to know the basics of the ProHealth REU and meet other REU students and mentors!

Week 2: Have related work and methods outline done. Read and explore more about our specific project including transcribing, summaries, and starting to look at the data. Getting IRB confirmation and other accounts sorted.

Week 3: Draft for related work and methods and an outline for the introduction are due. Delve more into data analysis and finding major themes, along with looking into possible algorithms. Review Facebook activities and solidify what we will do in these activities. Start designing how we will present TreatYoSelf Drexel App (video and guidelines booklet). Will find out how recruitment from PositiveLink is going on 6/8/27. More reading.

Week 4: Outline for abstract, draft for introduction, and peer reviews for both related work & methods are due. Start designing an algorithm for our forum data. Meeting with Positive Link to discuss Facebook activities and if changes need to be made to them. Have almost finalized video and guidelines for TreatYoSelf app to be discussed and reviewed with other before meeting on Friday. Meeting with TreatYoSelf group on Friday 6/16/17 to discuss how we will be addressing their app to the Facebook group.  Possibly launch the Facebook group and distribute questionnaire and ice breakers.

Week 5: Draft for abstract & related work, peer review for introduction, methods finalized, and an outline for findings and discussion. Depending on PositiveLink’s recruitment, we will or will not launch the FB group this week. If it is launched we need to run our FB activities by PositiveLink and we’ll begin our questionnaire, introductions, and ice breakers.  Use TreatYoSelf’s groups critics to improve our video and guidelines. Solidify our algorithm for the forum data and start distributing it (maybe –> Depended on the data).  Draft our online professional presence. Finish up transcriptions and readings that were assigned. 

Week 6: Peer review for abstract, drafts for introduction, findings, & discussion, and a finalized related work (iteration, iteration, and more iteration). Receive peer review data and give more reviews. We are planning on fully launching the Facebook group for those recruited online on Monday, July 3rd!  Since it is being launch we will be monitoring the group and implementing the guidelines, introductions, and ice breakers that we have created for the first week. We have also made some progress with our form data and we keep iterating on this as well. I will continue working on my online professional presence and other deliverables (videos, etc.). Receive feedback from Drexel group about TreatYoSelf guidebook and video and make necessary changes. Work on making FB activities applicable to both PositiveLink recruits and FB recruits. 

Week 7: Draft for abstract, finalized introduction, and peer review for findings & discussion. Continue iterating with online professional presence and other deliverables (videos, etc.). Facebook group should be launched, we will continue to monitor it and collect data while simultaneously launching more activities. We need to have our ranking of activity figured out and to be ready to implement. We need to find the best way to collect our Facebook data.Receive feedback from Drexel group about TreatYoSelf guidebook and video and make necessary changes. Here is a link to the video we made for them, take a look! Much more…

Week 8: Peer review for abstract and drafts for findings & discussion. Completely change our paper direction, which means iterate, iterate, and ohh wait iterate some more! Make necessary changes to the TreatYoSelf video and guidebook. Changes to FB activities: deploy ranking of problems activity and finalize photo elicitation activity. Work on poster and video for last week. Continuously change online professional presence. Keep studying for the GRE and figure out what grad programs what I would like to apply to! I’m a bit scared of figuring all of this out, but I am sure it’ll all work itself out. 

Week 9: Finalized for abstract, findings, and discussion. Basically finalize EVERYTHING!!!!! This week is major push time and will require even more hours in the books, but it is exciting! We have already finalized our week 3 and 4 activity for the FB group so we do not have to worry about that as much. Now we will be taking a more in depth look at the information that we received for weeks 1 and 2 and prepping the week 5 activity. We will be iterating a lot on our paper and poster this week, with hopefully great outcomes! There will be a lot going on but I am ready and excited for the challenge! 

Week 10: Everything needs to be camera ready!!!! Poster Presentation and packing by Friday! Make sure I say goodbye and thank you to all! Make sure i obtain everyone’s contact information. Have meetings with people I need to ask grad school questions. Enjoy my last week!

Final Timeline Note: Our timeline was always constantly changing through out the REU experience and this was our last week. We had to have all of our major deliverables in this week and it was quite hectic but everything got done!

Paper/Poster/Video: 

Our three major end deliverables were the paper, poster, and video! We ended up completing all of them and just have to make minor edits to our paper so that it is finalized for the WISH @AMIA conference/workshop to submit which is due on August 17th.

Paper:

Minor edits to the paper are needed for the WISH @AMIA conference. Submission deadline: August 17th.

Poster: 

We did many many iterations of our poster as well and in the end it we are very happy with how it turned out!

Here is a link to our finalized poster.

Video: 

We also received some good feedback on our video and made many changes to it as well and we were happy with the end product.

Here is a link to our finalized video.

My Overall Research Experience:

I enjoyed my entire summer experience with the ProHealth REU! It was a very rigorous pace but I learned a lot about a tier 1 research institution while also having a fun time along the way! I enjoyed it so much this summer that I decided to continuing working with the same graduate student and faculty mentor during the fall semester. I can’t describe how much I enjoyed this REU and will always remember it! Anyone who is considering doing REUs and is considering the ProHealth one I highly recommend it.

My Plans for the Future:

My most relevant plans for the future are that I am going into my senior year and will be applying to jobs as well as to different grad programs.

I have already started a spreadsheet with all of my thoughts and findings for grad schools, but I still have to get other aspects of it all in order. I would like to apply to 8 total grad programs and as of now I only know of 4 that I definitely want to apply to. These four programs include: IUB, CMU, Georgie Tech, and UW. They are all competitive schools so I will continue to build my application and fingers crossed!

Beyond all of these applications and hopefully acceptances I will choose what is the best fit and continue on from there.

 

Until Next Time…

Julia 🙂