As part of my internship, I was assigned to the government affairs division whose primary responsibility is as the lobbying and advocacy arm of the organization working in D.C. on Capitol Hill to advance their policy positions and legislation.  One of my primary goals was investigating what health care issues present themselves disproportionately in rural settings. From research and writing policy papers on behalf of the NRHA, I learned some of the most pressing problems impacting rural America included hospital closures, the opioid crisis, challenges with Native American healthcare and surprisingly an epidemic of maternal mortality.  I never understood, until the internship, the significance of the crisis that is facing rural mothers where outcomes for rural mothers are declining every year and are at or below the mortality metrics for many women in developing countries.

"Over the summer, I not only learned so much about the tech and startup industry, I also learned many key aspects of conduct and interpersonal skills within a professional setting. For example, I learned that open communication is essential to move forward with an issue and also to not be afraid to ask a lot of questions. [This experience] was informative and transformational for me as I was able to get a glimpse of life beyond college and I’m very excited to see where I can take my future career. I learned much about an industry that I wish to be a part of and I was able to build a solid foundation of professional and interpersonal skills through experience and the advice from my mentors."

- Michael Yan '23 | Roundtrip

Throughout the summer, we worked to answer the research question: where does humor belong in the math classroom?...I had two major data analysis and data collection projects this summer. The first project I did involved coding the unscientific twitter survey my mentor conducted towards the beginning of the summer. In this project, I identified humor examples teachers used and mentioned in the comments section of the twitter survey, and I categorized each example by humor type, teacher-initiated versus student-initiated humor etc. The second project I worked on involved coding video data. I analyzed about twenty hours of film data from high school and middle school students. I collected data of students’ humorous behaviors within the math classroom. The objective was to identify and analyze situations in which students were being “goofy.” I analyzed each of these data sets using google spreadsheet software, which is another important skill I learned on the job.

There are a handful of projects I worked on this summer. The first being a chronic care pilot bridging Optum and UHC. I researched and crafted a methodology for community-level interventions relating to nutrition (how we can leverage food desert database, social determinants of health, etc). Another was working with frontline call center agents in a "test-kitchen" environment where we set up sessions so they could choose which UI tools they preferred over others. Next, I worked with human capital partners on evaluating the enterprise employee ideation program to locate the seams and gaps to then determine specific recommendations to revamp. Lastly, I worked with a "clinical transformation" team to assess the return on investment for prior authorizations. I conducted research on specific treatments and tests to find if there existed adverse effects of denied claims, and therefore additional medical expense, to propose the option of eliminating prior auth for particular tests (sleep studies for example).