The Work I’ve Accomplished

 

This semester flew by, but I am excited to reflect on the work I have accomplished. Throughout all my projects this semester I focused on improving my scholarly writing skills and practiced describing my research to fellow interns, students, and family. As interns this semester, we practiced our elevator pitches and comprehensively taking about our internship projects. My work this semester included watching NVivo tutorials (qualitative software program for future projects), reading interviews with Check It participants to become familiar with the content I will be coding and to help create a preliminary codebook, formatting APA 7 citations, and logging peer reviewed journals into journal spreadsheets. I also collected peer reviewed articles on STI self- testing and presented my literature review synthesis from the summer to the Check It Team. Projects I will continue working on this spring include utilizing information from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention and the STI Survalance Full Report from 2018 in the introduction of the manuscript outline for our proposed paper and our main project, coding on NVivo. One of my favorite biweekly meetings from this fall included learning about the Sex, Power, and Culture Course taught at Tulane and the variety of course content the class covered and the meaningful impact it had on students. I also valued our continued conversations about Amendment 1 in the Louisiana Constitution from Katrina Rogers of Louisiana for Personal Freedoms as well as fellow interns who were working on projects related to stopping the amendment from passing. Our work as Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health interns is ever more meaningful as we see reproductive rights stripped away from women. I am looking forward to continuing my work with Dr. Lederer during the spring semester and continuing our research project and qualitative coding analysis.

 

Sincerely,

Anna Bluthardt