– An internship course is very important as it provides us with a chance to build connections between knowledge and applications. Courses can be at times too theoretical and abstract, explains Meizhu Chen.
Meizhu Chen is a master student at Health Economics, Policy and Managment at the University of Oslo.
– I think the internship experience has motivated me to learn more as I see a greater need for interdisciplinary corporation in knowledge production given future challenges we might face. I would try to stay in research or academia if I still have good questions to ask and puzzles unsolved. At the same time, if I find out some areas that I could act on and bring some impact, then I may choose a policy related career, Chen says.
– For international students, the internship course also provides us with another source of contacts outside school for us to get to know the local society and working environment better.
– I was looking for a research or academic related internship that could allow me to have some more hands-on in terms of Norwegian data and statistical methods. The posted position at Folkehelseinstituttet (FHI) fitted my interests well, she says.
Supervised by Shilpa Rao-Skirbekk and Terese Bekkevold, Chen was working with Work Package 5 in the EXHAUSTION project where they want to evaluate the social-economic impact of climate change or extreme weather using individual level data.
– I am in charge of the data cleaning and exploration process, which set a stage for my collegue’s formal regression analysis.
How was the application process?
– With the information provided by the department, we sent in the required documents for the application to the contact person in the organization. We were then contacted though email to arrange an interview. After the decision was made, we corporated the contracting process with both the department and the organization we are going to.
I was looking forward to meeting and working with researchers at FHI who are involved in scientific research that links to policy making.
What does a regular day at work look like for you?
– I worked mostly remotely. Since all the data analysis is done through a secured platform, I usually divide my weekly tasks into a few blocks so that I could do it before or after my daily schoolwork on campus.
My workload varies with our progress in the project. When we decide to extract some more information from the given data or test some additional hypotheses, we need to read the documentation, test the codes, and observe the patterns by setting up new procedures. These would take some time. However, once we get a set of procedures running, we just have to use them and verify if they are working properly for all data.
How are you using what you have learned at UiO in your internship?
– Working in a multidisciplinary team definitely requires us to apply different communication strategies that we learnt in Management courses. While doing the project, I was also trying to apply what I learnt from the method courses into applied and contextualized research.
On the technical side, all method courses such as statistics and econometrics set a ground for my knowledge base in applied research. However, researchers have to do a lot of critical thinking in real tasks, and I think that is definitely something that we do not learn enough from the current curriculum.
On the soft skill side, I think the things we learnt about the internal dynamics of an organization in fundamental management courses are quite relevant. It helps me to think about how I should work efficiently with colleagues from diverse backgrounds and with different priorities.
What have you learned so far during your internship?
– It was a great opportunity to work with “imperfect” real data from scratch and experience the learning by doing process of research design. We are going to represent and discuss our working paper at some conferences in the coming month and will also deliver the final report to EU by January 2024.
When we carry out research, on one hand we could always improve our work by trying and learning new things, and on the other hand we always face some deadlines or requirements. We must find some balance between these as an individual or/and as a team. With frequent and open communication, we managed to balance it as a team.
How has your integration as an intern into the workplace been so far?
– As an intern who work remotely, I also would meet weekly for our specific Work Package and biweekly for our overall projects. During the meetings, we could update our progress and challenges with our colleagues to obtain a shared pool of knowledge that could potentially help us to cross reference our work. Effective and timely communication is really helpful for the team to generate new ideas and avoid unnecessary mistakes or misunderstandings.
What would you say to other students considering doing an internship?
– For other students I would say: It would be a more beneficial experience if one has known what motivates and interests oneself and been prepared in terms of skills. Then, it would be more natural for the student to find the right match. During the internship, it would be great if the student could stay curious, think, and observe, and take more initiatives along the way.
For organizations: Guidance and feedback could be really helpful and much appreciated.