Senior Work Projects Provide a Preview of Future Careers

Friends School’s Senior Work Project (SWP) internship program provides seniors with the opportunity to spend three to four weeks at an organization or business of their choosing. Although initially voluntary when the program was started 30 years ago, it has become a tradition and all seniors participate.

Months in advance, students learn about the internship program and begin narrowing down possible opportunities and reaching out to organizations. The School maintains lists of businesses that have welcomed student interns previously, as well as a list of alumni and current parents who are willing to serve as mentors. Students have access to a broad network of prospective internships and mentors willing to provide them with real-world experiences.   

Throughout the project, students are required to write in a journal weekly to reflect on their experience and complete a presentation to students and staff upon completion. After this year’s presentations, we had the chance to sit down with three seniors, each working in different fields, and asked them a few questions about their experiences.
 

Tess Porter ‘24 (pictured above)

Q. What did you do for your Senior Work Project?
A. For my SWP I shadowed Dr. Meier, aliver/kidney/pancreas transplant surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center. I came with him to his transplant clinic where we talked to patients about their transplants. Some people were just starting the process of considering getting a transplant, and others were a few weeks post-op and needed their blood labs analyzed … Another thing I did was visit the OR. I got to see both liver and kidney transplants. Before my first surgery, I was worried that I would faint, but it was fine! It was extremely interesting. Another thing that I did was research hepatic steatohepatitis, which is basically just fatty liver disease. Dr. Meier does work to try and figure out how to use steatotic livers in transplants so that more people can get off the waiting list and have a better life.

Q. What was the highlight of your project?
A. The highlight has to have been the laparoscopic kidney transplant that I watched. It was great because I got to see exactly what the surgeons were doing since it was projected on screens around the room. I learned a lot about the surgery process that afternoon.

Q. What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced?
A. The biggest challenge was figuring out what all of the medical terminology meant. I'm still not 100% there, but I understand a lot more than I did in the beginning. Especially for rounds each morning or in the clinic, they talk about the blood lab results a lot. It's hard to remember what every test means, and even harder to remember the healthy range for each test. It was also very hard to talk to patients who were first discovering that they needed surgery. A lot of them didn't quite understand what was going on in their bodies, and even though the doctors would explain as best they could it was an informational overload for most people. A lot of the time they would get pretty upset, which was hard to watch.

Q. Having completed your project, has your opinion of this field changed? Are you more or less interested in pursuing this field in the future?
A. I am very glad that I did this SWP, since I am now much more interested in the field of surgery, especially transplant surgery. I'm fully considering going pre-med in college now, which I had thought was out of the question for me a month ago.

Krishna Kumar ‘24

Q. What did you do for your Senior Work Project?
A. I worked with an investigator in the Federal Public Defender Field.

Q. What was the highlight of your project?
A. I enjoyed learning more about the federal public defender's office and being a part of the work that gets done there. Just being with the investigators all day allowed me to learn more about how cases are
tried and the inner workings of the law system. 

Q. What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced?
A. The office is very busy and I had to learn how to be flexible with
hours and tasks. But, at the same time, the office was very flexible so I always felt comfortable communicating any challenges I might have with the people I worked with. 

Q. Having completed your project, has your opinion of this field changed? Are you more or less interested in pursuing this field in the future?
A. I believe I am more interested in pursuing this field in the future. 

Noah Ripke ‘24

Q. What did you do for your Senior Work Project?
A. My SWP was at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), where I did astronomy research with astronomer
Dr. Petric. Dr. Petric works in the Active Galactic Nuclei research group at STScI, where they study the very active center of galaxies, some of which include supermassive black holes. Our research involved taking new images from the James Webb Space Telescope named the "Little Red Dots," which
are extremely distant objects in the universe that have been identified as Active Galatic Nuclei. We studied these objects using Radio telescopes, and we made observations that have contradicted results from recent papers! So now I'm continuing through the summer to write a paper on our discoveries.

Q. What was the highlight of your project?
A. The highlight of my project was getting to
go into STScI on one of the last days of our projects and give a presentation to the AGN research group on what we were studying. The group was very excited about our findings and the topic and was curious to learn where it leads. This, on top of being there and getting to meet so many different researchers and astronomers, was just such a cool experience. It got me excited to keep studying these objects since so many people were interested in [my work.]

Q. What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced?
A. Since security is tight at STScI, and Dr. Petric worked from home frequently, I had to do most of my project from home. That meant that I had to figure out a lot of things on my own, but I was able to do it. It was challenging, but rewarding once I fixed an annoying bug, or made an interesting observation. It also meant that I got some great experience with the coding tools commonly used by astronomers.

Q. Having completed your project, has your opinion of this field changed? Are you more or less interested in pursuing this field in the future?
A. The work we did was very interesting, and it has definitely made me think about whether or not I want to pursue this in the future. I'm thinking that maybe the job of just purely an astronomer might not be right for me, but some mix of teaching and doing research in this field might be perfect.