My summer as a Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health intern was a great introduction to the reproductive climate and movement. While my area of focus was sexuality health education, I was exposed to a variety of research topics and methods within this broad, important subject. My primary projects this summer were three-fold: identifying college students’ gaps in STI knowledge through qualitative experimentation and literature review, developing a sexual communication scale for the NCHA, and contributing to a family planning and counseling grant proposal. Each task addressed a critical component of the research process, whether it was funding to start a project, instrument design to collect data, or assessment to present results.
I am excited my research skills grew through this internship and I explored the difficulties and rewards of research. Crafting questions and responses that captured respondents’ diverse experience was more challenging that I expected and rapid literature searches were required to meet grant proposal deadlines. However, this is the reality of research, often not seen in publications or discussed in the classroom setting. I am fortunate to have been selected as a fall intern to follow my projects to completion, particularly the writing and dissemination of the STI knowledge task.
Working in the field of reproductive health for the summer introduced me to the pervasive impact of reproductive health in society. Through conversations with Dr. Lederer, other interns, and guest lecturers, I learned how reproductive health and justice pervade economic, housing, criminal, and other issues. No matter what social issue concerns people, there is a definitive connection to the reproductive movement. I feel prepared and excited to continue as an intern and a reproductive health advocate, and I urge others to get involved through conversations, research, or activism to improve health and rights outcomes because any engagement is inherently intertwined with other sectors of justices.