Name: Tihitina A. Bekele
Class Year: 2021
Major: Psychology
Hometown: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Internship Organization: Haverford Intersectionality in the Social Mind Lab
Job Title: Research Assistant
Endowed Internship Funding Award: Endowed Internship Fund
Location: Haverford (remote)
What’s happening at your internship?
I remotely worked as a research assistant with my psych professor and two lab partners. I have been involved in various tasks for the past eight weeks such as background reading and conducting literature searches on the factors and effective ways of how White parents can talk to their kids about race, searching for children’s books on race, critical reading, and coding of psychological research to examine if their abstract accurately represents race and/or gender used in the stimuli. In addition, I was involved in coding for an online experiment website.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I worked as a research assistant during my junior year, so I wanted to continue working with the lab as an intern during the summer.
What has been your favorite part of this internship?
My favorite part of this internship has been our journal club, where each of us had the opportunity to choose a journal article of interest that we all read and discussed during our lab meetings. It allowed me to critically read articles and come up with questions and suggestions for future research. Moreover, it helped me to openly share my thoughts with the rest of the team.
Working remotely for the first time? What has that experience been like for you?
Yes, for the first time! It has been quite a process to be honest. The first few weeks were a bit hard to manage my time as the tasks that I was given were a bit broad, and I had to motivate myself to get things done. However, my professor started giving me specific short term tasks in the rest of the coming weeks, and I was able to shift my focus on learning new skills and accomplishing the tasks, which helped me to effectively work on my time management.
Visit the Summer 2020 Internships page to read more student stories.