Internship

Finally I am done with the symposium. It is not an easy task, I am no good at public speaking at all, leaving alone the fact that I had to present in front of a group of people who spend their whole life on social science research, in a language that I am far from comfortable with.

Now I am nearly done with this internship program and it is sort of hard to imagine summer passes so fast. But it was great experience. I was talking to my friend that it is hard for someone to find out a dream job, but I guess I found mine in this internship. Teaching and research, what a great combination--especially for someone who wants to be a housewife some day--like me. =)

I worked on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) this summer, it is probably the best longitudinal study in the field. In fact, my first exposure to the PSID was in the honors research seminar, back then, I was only amazed by the amount of information contained in the PSID, but when I started the internship program, I got to know how the sampling was done, how the study was designed and maintained for 40 years. The researchers had made working with PSID extremely easy, they took care of almost everything--missing data, data structure and etc.

This is a picture of my office, isn't it great to have an office that you can see the sky everyday? But I must say, in a sunny afternoon, and when the air con was down, my office would become unbearably hot.

This was the first day of the program, notice that I was wearing my name tag and I forgot to take it down and was moving around with my name tag on. On the bus back home, a person approached me and asked:"How do you pronounce your name?" haha

I was talking to some other interns and we all agreed that the best thing about this internship was we were so well fed. When we go to a research seminar, nice sandwiches would be provided; when we meet in the morning, we had breakfast together; bowling outing, baseball game, dinner meeting, everything and anything, nice food was provided.