As the summer holidays draw to a close and the new University term starts we bid farewell to our inaugural cohort of student interns who undertook paid summer placements here in HSRU and CHaRT. We had had six students working with us on a variety of projects for between eight and twelve weeks.
Maciej Muszynski and Emmanuel Iwegbu were embedded within our programming team for the duration of the internship. Both worked on the design and implementation of the new public facing website for future trials. They were also involved in the documentation of the new template. The public facing trial websites that have been designed during this time have continued to receive very positive feedback from internal and external audiences. Maciej and Emmanuel highlighted that they learnt many things in a very short space of time and are confident to apply them in their studies and future career opportunities. Maciej added that “During this placement I have improved my front-end web developing skills, which will help my future career.”
Daniel Williams has a background in Neuroscience and Psychology. Funding for his internship was part of Medical Research Scotland’s Vacation Scholarship scheme. He worked with Heidi Gardner and Shaun Treweek on a systematic review of non-randomised evaluations of strategies to improve participant recruitment to randomised controlled trials. Daniel commented that he felt he was “…making an impact on tomorrow’s science rather than science for the sake of science”.
Three students took up research project placements: Chloe Brooks (Global Health and Management) reviewed records from ClinicalTrials.gov and ISRCTN and summarised the reasons why randomised controlled trials are suspended. Chloe and her supervisors are now writing this work up for publication. Katie Gambier-Ross (Neuroscience with Psychology) worked on ESTER, an evidence synthesis project evaluating surgical treatments for women with stress urinary incontinence. Katie was tasked with extracting data from existing systematic reviews and other published studies and to compile this information into a dataset for statistical analysis. Finally, Anna Wolf (Psychology) was involved in developing theoretically informed behaviour change intervention to target questionnaire response for the PUrE trial team. Katie said “This internship has opened my eyes to the field of Health Service Research which I am now strongly considering pursuing a career in. It has been a fantastic opportunity to be a part of this multi-disciplinary team and has given me a great foundation of research skills.”
The Unit Director, Professor Craig Ramsay, said “The placements have been an enormous success for the students and for HSRU. We wish them all well in their future studies and look forward to welcoming a new cohort next year.”
Any prospective interns for the summer 2017 cohort should contact Graeme MacLennan (g.maclennan@abdn.ac.uk) if they wish to be alerted when adverts for next year are released. Internships are open to current University of Aberdeen students only.