An Intern’s Impressions 4: what is the collective term for graphs…?
Ellie Jaques, a geography student at Bristol University, has now finished her fourth week as a summer intern with AlphaBio, and here is her most recent update:
Week four marks the halfway point of my internship, and it really is flying by. These blogs come around quicker each week. It is somewhat crazy to think that four weeks ago I had no idea what I was about to start and what I would be doing each day. What I’ve really enjoyed so far is that each week has been so different from the last, hopefully this has been obvious from my previous blogs! This week was the same, or should I say different?
The main focus of this week was from the market and technical development team, using data from recent trials (this one specifically was on cucumbers) I have been asked to create short PowerPoint presentations that highlight the key findings from the trial and graphically show this.
I thought this task wouldn’t be too tricky as it is similar to the research projects I’ve conducted at uni, but how wrong I was. I was sent over a 130-page document with all the details from the trial, possibly one of the longest documents I’ve ever seen. There was over 30 pages of data tables (not including those in the appendix).
My first task was to almost act like a detective and figure out what all this data meant and how I could best turn it into graphs that are simple. This detective work took me almost all of Monday: who knew cucumbers could be so confusing? I then set to work on creating the graphs and the presentation to accompany them. Somewhat funny that I thought I’d escaped the number crunching.
This task has maybe been the most rewarding so far because I found it so challenging and now understand it through creating these graphs and taking the time to really think about what the data is showing. This will definitely help me with my dissertation next year which is just an added bonus!
I also worked on my other tasks this week that I’ve previously mentioned, all of which are going well and progressing nicely. A very busy week if you ask me, and also possibly the first week that B-Corp has barely been mentioned, which feels rather strange at this point.
I think it is often thought that internships are something to endure and just get through to say you’ve done it and maybe learn the odd thing. However, I have experienced the complete opposite; this first half has flown by at an alarming pace, but I’ve had a great time, learning lots and experiencing so much. I can firmly say that so far, my internship has been the complete opposite of what I thought it could be and what the media so often portray them to be.
As I start the second half of this internship, I am looking forward to what else I will do and experience. I guess you’ll just have to read my future blogs to see what happens.