Reflections

With a new class of fellows applying for my position I have had a wave of email inquiries asking about my position. It is exciting that others are interested and it has also forced me to take a moment to reflect on what I've been working on and what I think about my work. I thought I'd share some of these thoughts with the blog.

My favorite and least favorite parts of my job

One of my favorite parts of the jobs is that I have the opportunity to be involved in projects from the beginning to the end. I'm not just doing background research or just writing up results. Having the opportunity to be a part of each phase has made me invested in the work and taught me about what goes into research. Also the staff that I work closest with is very small (there are 5 of us on the center team--we have staff in 5 different research sites in the US and we are like the headquarters) so I am very involved. I feel like my work matter and makes a direct impact on what we as an organization are able to produce. I think part of this is due to my boss, who makes a great effort to engage me throughout the process and account for my own interests. She offers great guidance and is a really wonderful person to work under.

The hardest part of my job that I’ve had to adjust is spending the majority of my time in an office. Now that things have gotten busy around here I am busy going to meetings and interviewing families in the emergency room to help build our dataset. I am treasuring the days that I can stay in my office to get work done. Since Children's HealthWatch research is health policy research a lot of that happens on the computer...doing literature searches, planning analyses, searching for outside data sets, writing etc. This has been an adjustment from college life where you are up and about all the time.


The PP55 community in Boston

I have two mentors who are from the class of '98 and '00. They compliment each other well--one is very interested in what I'm thinking about and interested in my projects at work. He's been great for bouncing around ideas about my work projects. My other mentor is in her final year of residency and has been really great at giving me suggestions of ways to settle into a new city and meet new people. They are very accessible to me and eager to email and chat, but I haven't felt like I've needed to rely on them for much. I think the greatest sense of support I've found was in our first seminar about graduate school. This seminar was with the Harvard equivalent of PP55 and alums were invited to speak. It was more of a casual discussion than a lecture, which I have really appreciated. I found it very helpful to hear about the experiences of people a couple of life stages ahead and learn how they came to be where they are.


Preparation for my job

I definitely felt prepared for the work I am doing. Though I have definitely had to learn a lot about the health programs and policy we focus the most on, but I certainly felt like I had the skills to do this coming out of college. My writing is also being challenged and because I am no longer long writing research papers. I am learning to write policy/advocacy pieces which are not something I learned in college.


Would I accept this position if I did it over again?

Yes, definitely!