By: Anna Bluthardt
With the COVID- 19 pandemic continuing to ravage our country, I am evermore motivated to be learning and working in the public health field to ensure that important projects go uninterrupted, as well as learning about crucial reproductive rights work and advocacy from my fellow interns and professionals. I mentioned in my first blog post that I was embarking on completing a comprehensive literature review this summer for a research question surrounding young African American men’s reactions to their positive chlamydia diagnosis. I put together a synthesis of all the literature from the review to share with the Check It Team and Dr. Lederer. Even though the research question I was gathering literature for was quite specific, I surveyed a vast body of literature during my research process where I learned barriers to testing and care for a variety of STIs. This process helped me situate how studies already published and Check It as a whole are part of an effort to improve health outcomes and the broader public health picture. I also worked on inter-rater reliability preparation and coding for some of Dr. Lederer’s other ongoing projects, which was a great introduction to how qualitative data is coded and used in research studies.
The online nature of my internship required me to be thoughtful and articulate when sharing the myriad details without the benefit of being face-to-face. My internship instilled the importance of time management, accountability, and communication, and I now feel fully competent to work remotely on any assignment or project. I will continue working with Dr. Lederer and the Check It team this fall to see through the research project and utilize the strong foundational knowledge about the research questions and the overall Check It program I have developed. Although I completed the majority of my work independently and on my own time, I value the collective aspect of this internship as it provides me the opportunity to synthesize and share my work with my fellow interns, learn about all the other reproductive health and justice work being done in New Orleans by my peers, and see familiar faces during a time of social isolation, especially through our biweekly meetings. Although I’m glad to have a few days devoted to Netflix before the fall semester, I’m eager to start my work again for the RRRH Internship!