DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Tell us about a typical day at your co-op.  How do you spend your time?  What motivates you to do this work?

 

My day starts at 9am when I arrive to work. I typically start off my day working on a clinical trial. My job is to look through 500 patients' medical records to find out specific information, such as certain protein/blood levels, as well as whether or not they had infections. If they did have an infection, I have to state what type (bacterial, fungal, or viral). Sometimes this takes a while because I have to look up the pathogen or abbreviated name to figure out what type of infection it causes.

 

The second half of my day, usually around 1pm, involves looking at MRIs of patients with an aggressive type of brain cancer, Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). I look at the patients' scans and make sure that all of their scans are aligned so that they can be compared. I also "register" the images, which involes deforming the image to ensure that certain parts of the brain are aligned. It is very important that I use good judgment in deciding what registration is best, because the doctors will use them to draw their ROIs and impressions about the tumor. 

 

Sometimes, when I have extra time, I go into the reading room where the radiologists review the clinical PET/CTs that were taken throughout the day. They assess the images to look for changes from past scans, as well as problematic contrast uptake (which can indicate tumor presence). It is valuable to be able to sit in and ask questions about the images and learn more about what the radiologists are looking for. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In what ways is CaNCURE contributing to your personal and professional learning objectives?

 

CaNCURE is contributing to my personal learning objectives because I was able to tailor this co-op to my interests. Thanks to great mentors, I am able to focus specifically on brain research. My co-op has been accomodating to my personal preferences, from CaNCURE granting my request to work in a hospital/clinical setting, to my mentors allowing me to work on projects that I have personal interests in. 

 

Because I can focus on my passion, the brain, while combining it with an up and coming immunotherapy research, I am also contributing to my professional learning objectives. I am forging great working relationships with physicists, neuroradiologists, and cancer doctors that I hope will provide me with a good set of connections when I graduate and beyond.  In addition, I am learning a lot about the field of radiology - I can know read MRIs, draw ROIs and transform images for clinical purposes.

 

 

 

 



DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Describe a challenge you have encountered during your co-op.  How did you approach it?  What did you learn from it?

 

For the first three months of my co-op, I was not getting assigned enough work for a full time position. I was getting about 3 hours of work a day and was getting increasingly frustrated. To solve my problem, I reached out to my co-op advisor and then to one of the doctors mentoring me. I asked her if there were any projects I could be included on and she told me of two potential projects. By reaching out to her and asking for more work, I learned that people are willing to help you if you communicate what you need from them. I also learned that jobs aren't like school, where you have a constant stream of work. Sometimes, there are slow periods in the research world, and sometimes it is very busy. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What opportunities have you had during your co-op to apply skills and/or knowledge that you learned in the classroom?

 

I have had the opportunity to strengthen my knowledge of anatomy through this co-op. Because I worked in radiology, I spent most of the day looking at MRIs of patients. I became well acquainted with the different regions of the body, what organs look like, and most rewarding for me, what the brain looks like. Being able to recall the anatomy and associate it with real images of people helped me reinforce all of the small details of the human anatomy. 

 

In addition, I have had to read a vast amount of academic papers during this co-op, to understand the basis of the research projects and the methods of imaging used. In my clinical neuroscience class, we would practice reading and interpreting academic papers. I was able to use the skills I learned in class, like paying close attention to any images or figures, to better understand the papers I needed to read for work. It also helped me to be a faster and more efficient reader of scientific papers. 

 

 

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

What new skills and knowledge have you acquired during your CaNCURE experience?  What additional skills and knowledge would you like to acquire and why do you need them?

 

During my CaNCURE experience, I have learned a great deal about oncologic imaging. Since beginning this co-op, I have learned how to post-process MRI data as well as interpret the data and make informed conclusions on the progress of a patient. Not only will this help me with my career, this will also help me throughout my life as people I know get scans. I can help interpret them and help them to understand exactly what they are seeing. I also have a very strong concept of the process of cancer diagnosis, from the scan to the biopsies and surgeries, to the therapies and subsequent scans. Even if I choose another field besides oncology, I know that this information will be useful at other points in my life, especially since 1 in 2 males and 1 in 3 females will get some type of cancer in their lifetime. 

 

How is your typical day different from the start of your co-op?  Have any of your motivations changed?  What new motivators do you have?

 

At the beginning of my co-op, I relied on my boss to walk me through each part of the project step-by-step. I had never done my own research before and therefore had little idea of the steps in which things needed to be done. However, now that I am familiar with the research process, I can often work for a few days or a week without needing to check in with my boss. On Mondays, we have weekly lab meetings, and during that time we discuss what is expected from all of the lab members to be done during that week. I am able to communicate any important findings and my progress for the week, and for the rest of the week I am able to focus on doing my work at the pace and order that works for me. 

 

At the beginning of this co-op, I was motivated by the idea of helping to "cure cancer" and by the idea of working with the brain. While these concepts still play a great factor in motivating me, I also have come to appreciate the field of radiology for its role in neurology, oncology and medicine in general. I have learned so much about the anatomy, structure, and function of the brain simply by spending 8 hours a day studying it. I can now look at a tumor inside a brain and give you an estimate of the severity of it based on its visual characteristics. While I don't think I will end up going into radiology (I have discovered through this co-op that spending my days in the hospital's basement is not for me), I now appreciate it and understand how it will be useful to me during my career as a doctor. 

 

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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

CaNCURE is a Northeastern University and Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center

 partnership funded by the National Cancer Institute

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.