What It’s Like Being a PEER Intern

Being an intern at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation means having a customized schedule work for you. I started as a Program Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Intern in August 2021 when I began my journey. The orientation provided by Dr. Callie Edwards is an important milestone because I got to know more about the projects I could be working on and met my cohort of PEER interns. My fellow interns and I got to know each other through the projects we worked on together. Collaborating with your cohort will be the most rewarding experience because everyone’s unique perspective shines through in the projects one does. Projects are versatile, which means I never got bored. There are always so many different projects one can take on that I got to experience a little bit of everything.

[pullquote color=”wolfpackred”]Collaborating with your cohort will be the most rewarding experience because everyone’s unique perspective shines through in the projects one does.[/pullquote]

However, a day in the life of a PEER intern consists of clocking in and reaching out to Dr.Callie Edwards to see if any of the teams at the Friday Institute need assistance on a specific project for the day. Once I reached out, I got one of three responses. The first response is that there was a new project I could work on and I could get started on that. The second response could be to continue working on the current project. The final response is to do Citi trainings. Usually, I would get the second response since projects are always ongoing. Some of the projects I worked on were transcriptions, translations and finding validated surveys and academic journals. 

One of the major projects I had this semester was finding validated surveys for the PEER Group. The excel sheet I used consisted of various categories of research areas the Friday Institute needed to obtain validated surveys for. I had to go to the ERIC database, which is an educational database to find peer-reviewed validated surveys. The process itself was reiterative since I could go into the database to search the category name to get the results of the peer-reviewed validated surveys. After I found the surveys, I input the required information on the excel sheet. I did this for each of the tabs. Once I finished, I contacted Dr.Callie Edwards to go over the Excel sheet and give feedback on what I should work on. With the feedback I received, I made modifications to the Excel sheet in adding a column and correcting the citations. A final task I did was create a summary of my process so fellow interns could do the same in the future. 

Overall, knowing that the project I started and finished can be used in future projects as well as help future interns in knowing the process of how to search for validated surveys was rewarding. Being able to see the entire process of a major project is an amazing feeling. By being a part of the PEER intern group this year I got the opportunity to take on this project and see that I am capable of doing a research project on my own. The internship gives you the opportunity to build your technical abilities as well as confidence, which is what I got out of this one project. Imagine the other projects; there are endless possibilities for the skills one could gain.