How has this experience (the internship) made you consider your college path that will ultimately lead to your career?As I mentioned in a previous blog post, simply being on a college campus and living in a college town for three and a half weeks did a number on my initial college plans. I'm still weary of a potential mid-college crisis, so I'm going to try to keep my career options open (and vague), but I have come to a few general conclusions. I've come to realize that, while the academics of any particular college are still certainly the most important things to consider, details like campus culture and building architecture have impact that should not be underestimated. I've reaffirmed my distaste for greek life, but have grown (at least a little) more enthusiastic about sports events. Perhaps most importantly in the short term, I've discovered a couple new colleges to add to my applications list that I had glossed over in previous college projects. Consider what you have observed and learned about your mentor or other employees at your site, and reflect on your own academic & professional preparation.The major commonality I've noticed between everyone I've met during my internship is how hard working they are. Whether they're a student studying for the Bar exam, or a professor working on a research project, everyone works long hours, seems genuinely enthusiastic about what they do, and if they ever get tired they don't show it. I'd like to think that I share at least some of these qualities, but knowing I don't gives me something to strive for.
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Above is a video of what web scraping actually looks like once you hit 'run'.
How did you measure the success of the work you did while you were an intern? What did you learn from this?My internship boils down to being about one thing: data collection. To figure out who people give their money to upon death, you need to analyse probate records; and in order to analyse probate records you need a lot of records. I would measure the success of my internship on how many probate documents I managed to acquire, using the fact that over the past 2-3 years the Probate Project has amassed about 70,000 documents. At the time of writing, I've collected about 13,500 wills, increasing the Project's total wills by a factor of a little over 1.19. Not bad for two and a half weeks. My main take away from this experience has been to never underestimate the power of automation. Humans have slow reflexes and get tired, and where I can manually download 200 wills a day, a computer can download 2,000. How was your work significant or meaningful to the world beyond school and your specific internship site?The work I'm doing with the Probate Project will could become very important to government policy decisions several years down the road. When a person dies intestate (without a will) the state who's jurisdiction they fall under uses an algorithm to split up their money. Essentially, this algorithm is trying to guess what the person would want done with their estate. Wouldn't such an algorithm be much more effective if it were based on what actual people do with their money, not just some law-maker's best guess? When the Probate Project is completed, we'll have the information we need to make these sorts of decisions. How did your view of life beyond high school change or develop during your time as an intern?Seeing as my internship takes place at a college, I've had a lot of opportunities to figure out what I might want to do with that stage of my life. Our previous 'College Knowledge' Humanities project was helpful, but nothing beats the real thing. During this internship I've reconsidered a lot of colleges an whether to apply to them. Being in this part of the county has also made me much more open to perhaps going to college in a more arboreal climate (though I've been told this may be because I haven't experienced a Michigan winter yet). And, of course, I've started to formulate what I want to say in my will. What new appreciations did you develop while working as an intern? Why?Solitude. Coming from a high school like HTH, it was a bit of a culture shock to be given my own office space and very few people to share it with. My main workplace social interaction each day is going out for lunch with my mentor, and aside from that I basically am in the company of myself for the entire work day. At first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to stand not having someone to talk to for hours at a time, but it's grown on me over the weeks. I know that most jobs won't be like this one, and thanks to my time at HTH I'll be prepared for those as well, but should I come across a more solitary job at some point in the future I'm happy to say I probably wouldn't turn it down.
How have you advocated for yourself during your internship, or seen advocacy demonstrated in other situations?During my first meeting with my internship mentor I was told "not to suffer in silence", or even better "suffer in silence for a little while, and if you're really stuck come find me". I took this advice to heart, which turned out to be useful because it actually took IT the nearly my entire first day to get my account set up. Because of the way the locations of our offices and my mentor's busy schedule, I occasionally would find myself in situations where I had nothing to do and no one to ask for work. I took advantage of these situations by reading the some of the 70,000 wills I had on file and searching up definitions for any word I didn't understand so that I would become (at least a little) more knowledgeable about the overall field of work I was participating in. After nearly 2 weeks of internship, I've found a good niche writing and watching over web scraping scripts in order to increase to overall amount of wills we have on record. Are you following the advice in "How to be an intern everyone remembers"? If so, how is it working out? If not, what are you going to start doing?I've made sure to follow tips 1 and 2 of the advice sheet, keeping a notebook with me for most of the day and always finding something to do. Tips 3 and 4 have been easy due to the solitary nature of my work and the fact it starts at 9:00am. Tip 5 was initially tricky since I could only pack so much into a travel bag, but the Sunday before internship began I went shopping and got some U of M swag to look the part.
My main project for internship is to collect wills via web scraping. Web scraping is the act of using a computer program to sift through a website and collect the data you need (in my case, wills). So essentially, I'm writing a JavaScript program to collect data. As far as I can tell, I'll probably be able to post my finished script by the end of internship, so you can see for yourself what I'm doing. In order to make my web scraping program I'm using a system called 'Puppeteer' which 'puppets' a special version of google chrome to navigate the website. The bad news is that I need to use a JS program to interact with HTML webpages, and I have almost no experience with either JS or HTML. The good news is that Puppeteer is a very popular tool, which means that there are tons of resources I can use if I ever get stuck. My main challenge will probably be the websites I'm scraping from, most of which are barely usable.
InterviewQ; What are Jim Hines' main duties and responsibilities? A: As a professor at the University of Michigan, Jim Hines spends most of his time working on research projects and teaching. Q: Is there anything you wish you'd realized about the world of work when you were my age? A: The most effective way to work is with focused energy. Q: What is a typical work day like during the school year? A: Jim Hines' daily activities during the school year include teaching students, working on research projects, editing journals, organizing conferences, and supervising PhD dissertations. Q: How important is getting along with other people in your career? A: People skills are important in any career, but less so in this one than average. Q: What question did I not ask that I should have? A: You should have asked "do people like the job?", the answer to that question being yes. People who work here have lots of other job opportunities, and nobody takes them. JournalWriting this at the end of my first week of internship, I have to say that what I've been doing is extremely interesting, but not in the way I had expected. Pre-internship, I had envisioned 'working on a research project' to involve analyzing huge amounts of data and searching for patterns. As it turns out, at least in this stage of this research project, the real challenge is finding the huge amounts of data to begin with. The first three days of my internship were largely consumed by sorting through county information to see which ones store wills online, and in the latest two days I've started learning how to write web scraping software to automatically browse and download wills from online records (I've finished the browsing portion, I just have to figure out how to download things). Aside from general things like people skills, very little of my internship work has related back to school, so I've spent a lot of time just figuring out how I'm supposed to do the things I'm supposed to do. Nonetheless, I'm confident in my ability to learn on the fly, and know everything will work out in the end.
Today I started working at the University of Michigan as a research assistant. The building I'm working in is the University's law school, and it's gorgeous. I have my own (tiny) office on the 8th floor. Since the office is located in the stacks, most of the hallways I walked through my first day were filled with books. Since it was my first day, I spent most of my time with my mentor, Jim Hines, and a member of the Law School's IT staff named Jason who set me up with all the applications I'll need to use.
My main job as an intern is working on the Probate Project, which is an attempt to catalog and analyze how people distribute their wealth in their wills. Despite wills of the deceased being public information, online documentation is spotty at best, so finding data is difficult. Nonetheless, I'm very excited to be working on a project that looks like it will wind up being really useful. My main concern is that I won't be able to handle the project's morbidity. For the most parts I think I can stomach it, but there are a few sections that make me a little squeamish. For example, we want to know what age people usually write their wills at; a good way to do that is to find a group of deceased people who vary in age and see which ones have wills. The largest modern group of deceased Americans who didn't know they were going to die are the victims of 9/11, so I spent a lot of my first day on the job looking up the wills of 9/11 victims. Hopefully, things don't get much more morbid than that, but If they do I'll just have to find a way to cope. Two weeks before internship, all 11th graders are expected to spend a 'Career Day' shadowing their mentors.. Since my internship is in Michigan and I can't fly out there for a single Tuesday, I spent my Career Day at the Law Office of Joni K. Eisenstein inc. My day of shadowing Ms. Eisenstein began with several appearances Superior Court, where I was surprised to note just how casual everyone seemed to be. Cases were handled very quickly and efficiently, sometimes the whole process would take less than a minute. When I asked Ms. Eisenstein about this, she explained that a lot times the defense and prosecution can quickly come to an agreement on what sort of sentence the defendant should receive so long as everyone has the same information. The heated debates that make headlines aren't uncommon, but they aren't quite the norm. After a lunch break we headed to traffic court, where Ms. Eisenstein succeeded in defending a client because the officer who gave the client a ticket didn't show up to the hearing.
Since Ms. Eisenstein is self employed, I asked her directly what her policies are on absences in the workplace. She told me that if someone has a good excuse she's fine with the occasional absence, but if things become a pattern she might consider finding a better employee. Work dress code is a little more strict. Every Attorney I saw at either court was in business formal attire, so suits and ties for men and dress suits for women. Throughout the day I noticed several ways that the skills I'm currently learning in school could be of use in the workplace. Perhaps the most useful skill I noticed was the ability to talk and make progress with people you (in this case are literally paid to) disagree with. A requirement for that skill is the ability to make a good argument in the first place, so if I were to become a lawyer all the argumentative essays I write for humanities would pay off. I saw many Spanish translators, so if I ever got fluent enough in Spanish to do that job I'm sure it would be interesting. Near the beginning of the day, when it came up in conversation that I have an interest in STEM, Ms. Eisenstein suggested that I look into becoming a Patent Lawyer; partially because a background in STEM is a requirement for that field, and partially because Patent Lawyers make a copious amount of money. |