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For the duration of this internship, I worked as an intern at King's College Hospital. More specifically, I worked in research in their biochemistry department under the supervision of Dr. Royce Vincent, who is a biochemist and endocrinologist at the hospital. In this role, I worked mostly in data analysis and assisted on the research projects that Dr. Vincent and his team were undertaking. Dr. Vincent specialized in the area of obesity and the implications of weight loss/gain from an endocrine perspective, and I worked on two major projects within that field: 1. studying the impact of bariatric surgery (weight loss surgery) on nutritional deficiencies, and 2. analyzing the correlation between BMI/weight class and susceptibility to COVID. For the purposes of these two projects, Dr. Vincent would send me large excel databases with a variety of information from patients at the hospital, along with a list of statistical tests he wanted me to run. Using the software SPSS, I ran the numerous tests he requested and sent the results back to him. Following the conclusion of these tests, I would draft an abstract summarizing my findings, which Dr. Vincent would then help me edit in order to prepare it for publication. Ultimately, my data and abstracts were used in a paper that was published by the European Conference for Obesity. I also performed a variety of literature searches for Dr. Vincent on topics related to his research, summarizing my findings in the form of a sort of academic research paper. Overall, this was an incredible experience that allowed me to gain exposure to the health and medical field in a system outside the United States.
This internship was an incredibly valuable and rewarding experience, and it is hard to pinpoint a specific story or event that was more impactful than others. I will say that one of the best moments of the internship was when Dr. Vincent informed me that the research and subsequent paper that we had been working on for the first few months of my internship had just been accepted by a European Obesity Conference, and that it was likely going to be published. He then emailed me a few weeks later and told me that our work had finally been published. He attached a copy of the final draft of our paper, which had been published in a journal that focused on developments in obesity-related co-morbidities. This was an amazing moment for me, as I truly got to see the culmination of all the work I had done over those months and feel as if my work had paid off.