Cancer Patients with ID
By: Kennedy Smihula
This internship was able to exceed any expectations that I had and I have learned more than I could have ever imagined. The first week was a little daunting on what the work for the duration of our time here would entail. However, I quickly realized that my education at Penn had prepared me well for this challenge.
The project focused on working on a narrative review of literature from start to finish. Our topic is related to patients with intellectual disabilities that have cancer. My partner and I, who is also from Penn, worked diligently through learning what the nursing research process entails. We started with database searches and learned how to establish what keywords etc are necessary to get every type of article that could apply to the research this totaled about 8,000 articles. We developed an exclusion and exclusion criteria and began the narrowing process. Starting with an abstract review we were able to narrow the original articles down to a few hundred for a full text review which further narrowed down our articles to about 37. These articles began a new process called extraction which entailed withdrawing information including: author, year, country, study aim, study design, amount of participants, age range of participants, gender of participants, level of disability, diagnosis or treatment used, measurement method, outcome, summary, conclusions, and any notes to add. Then we began a thematic analysis to determine similarities and commonalities within the literature.We grouped our articles until we were left with our four themes. With all of this information we were set up for success in the writing portion. We worked on the paper consisting of an abstract, introduction, methodology, discussion, and conclusion. We also were able to develop different diagrams and figures to add depth to our research. Our team was very supportive and along the way continued to make comments and lead us into the right direction.
Reflecting on the project I have learned skills of analyzing and synthesizing data, how to adapt writing to different forms of English (in this case UK grammar and spelling), and how to prepare a paper for publication with conciseness and submission guidelines. Though, with this internship there was so much behind the scenes learning since it was in a new country. I learned about new cultures, history, independence, adaptability, and incredible food.
I had thought that we were assisting with a project though I had never thought it would be possible to perform our own research. Yet, that is exactly what we did, with the incredible guidance of the team we were able to start and finish research which was much better than I could have ever expected. Now, I am beyond proud to say that I am a first name published author in an academic journal. I am confident that it will open many new doors into the research world that I had never considered prior but now am eager to explore.
The Global Research and Internship Program (GRIP) provides outstanding undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to intern or conduct research abroad for 8 to 12 weeks over the summer. Participants gain career-enhancing experience and global exposure that is essential in a global workforce.