so far so good

First couple days of senior project are promising. I’m working at CWRU in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department with a group that’s trying to determine a link between family history of cancer and malignancy of brain tumors. It started off sort of awkwardly because my sponsor’s kid was sick so she wasn’t there yesterday. The medical students she works with were really friendly and helpful though, and got me set up. I learned that I would be getting to have a lot more personal interaction with patients than I originally thought, which is exciting. Soon I’m going to start interviewing subjects over the phone to find out medical history or follow up on a previous interview. I had feared the project would be a lot of sorting numbers at a desk, which is part of it, but there is more interesting work too. It might be pretty stressful because a lot of the patients are not in very good condition. Today one of the nursing students called for a follow up only to find that the patient had died last month, which is a really awkward situation that apparently happens kind of a lot.

This afternoon I worked on more of what I thought I would be doing, which is compiling and sorting data about family history. It’s a lot of numbers and spreadsheets which could be kind of boring, but the data is really relevant interesting stuff that I could understand like the ages of their children, how many brothers and sisters they have, when their parents died, whether or not they know their biological father, etc. It was cool to be trusted with all of this very personal, confidential information (I had to take an online course before starting this to certify that I understood patient privacy and respect for human subjects). Anyway, I am a bit nervous about the phone interviews (news flash I’m not the smoothest conversationalist) but feeling optimistic overall.