cawep2016

Day 1: The Pre-Screening

Unfortunately I did not see Dr. McElreath’s email until returning home, I was kept quite busy today! I shadowed the optometric technicians today and watched them go through their normal test protocols. They conduct vision tests both with and without corrections (contact lenses or glasses). They conduct color vision tests without the correction and the depth perception test with correction. They also, if the patient agrees to doing it, take retinal photographs which can allow the optometrist to diagnose the patient with diseases such as glaucoma and eye infections. These photos can also help diagnose diabetes and hypertension. I also watched the technicians go through their process of interviewing the patients. They ask about a variety of things ranging from family medical history to how old a prescription is. I also got to watch how the receptionists in the front checked patients in and out and how information about a given patient is communicated from a technician to the doctor and vice versa. — Viraj

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Day 2: The Exam

Today was another busy day at the Eye Center at Southpoint Mall. I got to shadow Dr. Besharat today and got to see how she conducts her eye exams. The majority of the exams begin with checking the patients range of motion and then checking their prescription. Finally, Dr. Besharat asks the patient about any specific concerns they may have. Dr. Besharat diagnosed patients with glaucoma, cataracts, central serous retinopathy, and choroidal nevus. Glaucoma and cataracts are very common in patients and the other two conditions not so much. Central serous retinopathy is the clouding of macula that leads to blurred vision in usually one eye, it is caused by stress. A choroidal nevus is nothing more than a freckle on the eye that can sometimes cause a noticeable floater and other times can go unnoticed. It is very interesting how many unnoticed problems people have in their eyes and they think everything is OK because their prescription is working fine and they are able to see. I also got to see routine exams for updating prescriptions and changing contact lenses. At the end of the day I got to follow the entire appointment process from pre-screening to actually seeing the doctor. I also got to learn about their flagging system for their exam rooms. Below are photos of an exam chair, the actual machine used during an exam, and the flags near an exam room. — Viraj

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Tri properties internship begins

Tri properties is a construction management firm they do some land inheritances and the majority is land development where they rent or sell land for buildings and then they have to fill there buildings with tenants. I am interning here they gave me a nice office so that if they need me to type anything up I am right next to my boss who I am kind of just shadowing for a while as he teaches me what he really does as the major person in land development at the firm. I don’t think I am going to do as much building as I thought because I won’t be doing any construction but I will be learning about the other side of construction more the business side. I did a lot of different things from delivering property permits to city hall and going to a lunch meeting about what the company is doing as a whole and they showed me around the office and gave me my own office space.

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Day 2 @ Dunn PT

Today I got to learn more different techniques and stretches that they use on a regular basis. One thing I got to see today was dry needle therapy. This is when they take little needles and use them to reach different tight areas in patients body’s. I saw it used today on a patient who had a hurt jaw. He was able to use the dry needles to focus on more exact areas of the jaw that were

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hurting.

I also just wanted to say that I would take more pictures, but we arnt allowed to take pictures of the patients so it narrows down the things I can take pictures of. — Mackenzie

Dynamic Light Scattering

Today I researched dynamic light scattering and zeta potential. Changing the pH adjusts the charge of the particles and prevent aggravation to increase shelf-life. Ideally, all the particles will act as separate particles and not join together as conglomerates. The pH can induce a charge formation because the negatively charged particles will repel each other (as can surfactants and legions). I spent some of my own time learning about dynamic light scattering before participating in the experiment. Basically, it’s a way of determining size distribution of small particles or polymers in suspension in a solution. A laser is shot through a sample scatters lights of the particles and is collected by a photomultplier, and the resulting image is collected like static on a television. The speckled pattern can be analyzed to find patterns and trends. By the way, this is all based on Brownian motion, the idea that random motion of particles suspended in a gas or solution. Then, I participated in the testing of some of these samples before attending a lunch seminar on biometrics and policy. The lecture was very interesting study on stress in police officers in Durham (right after the famous Veil of Darkness Study conducted by RTI to test police officer bias) using high tech versions of fit bits. The emphasis was on the intervention of stress in this field in the future, based on the collected data. Directly afterward, I attended a conference call about the upcoming HIV project being presented on Thursday. To end the day, my pipetting skills were put to the test. I pipetted many test tubes with a buffer solution I mixed and diluted. Not only did I get to pick the music while doing so (sorry for the abundance of Train Phil), but I also had the opportunity to learn some more about excel in the process!

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Lean mean pipetting machine!

First Day, Fun Day

What a whirlwind! The day started with a crash course of RTI with Dr.Rothrock, and the “ambassador of Emily”, Mr.Phil Durham. RTI was the first research center in North Carolina, which came from a push to keep local intellectuals in North Carolina after college graduation. Since it’s creation in 1958, RTI has acted as a means to innovate the world through science as an “in between” non-profit for university and industry. There are many facets to the research including policy, social science, statistics, economics, biology and chemistry. Phil Durham is a biochemist, specializing in particles, and is part of the team working on a major HIV prevention research project. Additionally, he is working on an aerosol powder to target Tuberculosis at its source – the lungs. But there is a wide range of projects occurring at RTI simultaneously. Dr.Rothrock (head of the HIV project) is also part of an NIH evaluation, as well as worked on a recent vaginal ring project. By the end of the day I helped work on the HIV prevention experiment, measuring the absorbency of light in a photometer. I even ran my own test and graphed it against a blank buffer sample to view the resulting trend!

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Learning about light absorbency!

RTI Powerpoint: 2016 April Clinton Health

Excell Spreadsheet of Collected Data: Copy of Copy of EEL Dilution 8 5-23-16 Graph

Copy of EEL Dilution 8 5-23-16

Liza Day 2: I Think I’m Going To Like It Here

Fortunately my second day at McKinney was just as successful as the first! I felt more comfortable in the office and I definitely could tell I was starting to get the hang of things. I continued searching for footage to be used in the pitch, as it’s essential for the editors to have a lot of options to choose from. In addition to Getty Images, I use Vimeo and Youtube to collect different types of rips. Instead of simply downloading these videos, I use Snap-Z (like the snipping tool but for videos) to save the exact portion of the video I need.

Around lunch time, I met with Miriam, another producer at the agency. She explained how McKinney functions and how things normally look throughout the month. McKinney has worked with Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard for many Samsung commercials. They also make commercials for Crocs, SEC ESPN, Sherwin Williams Color Chips, Mentos, and possibly the new pitch! I was surprised to learn about all the different components that make one commercial happen. For example, if you are working with animals, an animal trainer and veterinarian of some sort need to be present at the shoot. If you are filming a commercial for paint, a medic must be on set because the paint is categorized as a “chemical” or “poison”. Furthermore, I enjoyed asking questions and having a deeper understanding of the work life in an advertising agency.

Link to McKinney’s website: http://www.mckinney.com

I decided to work though lunch and continue collecting footage. Tomorrow, we will discuss music options and I’ll get to see what an editor does compared to a producer.

-Liza

Day 2: We’re No Longer Scrubs!

Today might just have been the coolest day that I’ve ever experienced up to date. Jonathan and I didn’t actually start the day at Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic though; instead we woke up at 6:00 to shadow Dr. McElveen in an operating room at Duke Raleigh Hospital. When we arrived, we scrubbed up and received our official name tags to then follow Dr. McElveen to an operating room where he would preform a tympanoplasty operation.

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In the operating room, Dr. McElveen explained to us that the patient’s ear drum had collapsed when her Eustachian tube (a passage that permits the equalization of pressure on both sides of the ear drum) acted as a vacuum and sucked the ear drum in on itself. The collapse caused a tear in the ear drum, so the patient had a large hole in it. To correct this, Dr. McElveen cut cartilage away from the back of the patient’s ear and augmented it to her ear drum to patch up the hole.

The “middle  ear” of the patient during surgery, showing the stapes and incus bones as well as the folded-back tympanic membrane:

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After the successful surgery ended, we celebrated with some pictures with Dr. McElveen and in our scrubs:

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We then headed back to the Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic where Dr. McElveen set Jonathan and me up in the clinic’s temporal bone lab. He let us probe a temporal bone and it’s ear cartilage, and it was really cool! However, we did find out how hard it is to actually be a surgeon from this because of how precise your instruments need to be held, and how hard it is to keep your hands from shaking when probing the patient’s body. The ear canal is so narrow that I felt like I was playing Operation since I wasn’t supposed to shake the probe and touch the sides of the canal!

Dr. McElveen demonstrating how to probe the temporal bone in the bone lab:

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Jonathan probing the temporal bone:

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After we (half) successfully probed the temporal bone and the ear cartilage, we had our lunch break. After lunch, Dr. McElveen had to leave to go to South Carolina to perform a surgery there. Thus, Jonathan and I separated and I went with one of the audiologists to examine a patient with a tumor on their hearing nerve called an acoustic nueroma. She conducted several tests on the patient in order to determine whether it was worth it for Dr. McElveen to attempt to save the patient’s hearing capability in the ear and remove the tumor, or if he should just incise the hearing nerve in order to remove the tumor, which would ultimately render the patient deaf in the one ear. One of the tests was to lay the patient down in a dark room and put plugs in her ears that would send sounds through her nerves and a machine would measure how long it took the brain to receive the sound. The patient had to lay completely still so that all of the body’s focus would be on delivering those sounds to her brain. Apparently she was laying so still that she actually fell asleep during the test! This was okay though according to the audiologist because the data still comes back accurately. After several tests, the audiologist determined that it would not be worth it for Dr. McElveen to attempt to save the patient’s hearing capability.

Today was such an amazing experience since we did so much observing and hands-on activities! I will never forget being in that operating room and observing the surgery; my jaw was dropped the whole time as I was in such awe of what Dr. McElveen was doing throughout the operation! It was also a very formative experience, and it definitely sparked my interest in possibly going into surgery as a career option. – Kiran W.

Perks of Interning (Day 2 @ AMM)

Today I had a later start because Dr. Lewis didn’t start seeing patients until 9:30 am (Yay! More sleep). Like yesterday, I shadowed Dr. Lewis and asked questions throughout the day. Some of the topics that came up in our conversations today were vericose veins, Parkinson’s disease, bicornuate uterus, A1C test (a blood test that gives info on blood sugar – can be used to diagnose prediabetes and diabetes). Dr. Lewis’ last patient left around 12: 30 pm so after I had lunch I met with Ms. Daniel. I spent the rest of the day helping Ms. Daniel with data entry to remind patients (by email) of when the wellness programs take place. Overall, today was an eventful day. I’m glad that I learned so much!

-Biruk

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