Last week, I mainly worked on my abstract and the draft of my poster for the upcoming symposium. I still feel that I have developed a strong abstract and enhanced my writing abilities coming from a recent high school and community college graduate. I have now received feedback on the first draft of my poster and I now see things that could be changed that I didn’t notice before. Even before our feedback session in our Tuesday meeting, I realized how important receiving feedback from peers is. Having people who think in vastly different manners can provide insights into things you may have never realized. Every time I get feedback on things, whether that may be writing, a poster, or a presentation, I notice just how much things changed compared to what they originally were. I am very glad that we were able to give feedback in a large group.

As I previously mentioned with feedback, my poster has already changed so much and I expect it to continue to change a small amount as I work on it over the weekend. From formatting to adding additional text or visuals, it has already begun to take somewhat of a different form, and I am eager to see its final version. Additionally, I have come to realize that I need to make sure I am completely knowledgeable about the information I will present on my poster because there are small details and numbers that I cannot remember off the top of my head. Similarly, I need to make sure I have one-, three-, and five-minute pitches for my poster.

Aside from working on my poster this week, I was able to attend a resume workshop, which was very insightful. Again, learning things from different people provides vast amounts of perspectives which is something I truly love to see. I was able to implement some suggestions into my resume and fix a lot of formatting issues in my resume. A big thing I struggled with before and something I still continue to struggle with is shortening my resume to one page. I managed to get it to a little over one page but still not what I would like it to be. Now that I’m thinking of it, maybe having someone look it over for me can provide me some insight on what to potentially remove and, ultimately, shorten it.

As things are coming to an end, I am able to reflect on the various things I did and learned throughout my summer internship. Similar to how I feel when I see the changes in my writing, poster, etc. after receiving feedback, I get the same feeling of satisfaction when I complete a task that allows me to evolve as a student and as an individual. I am happy to say that I am already feeling a sense of that fulfillment.