Week 1, Day 1

Welcome to the first week of your internship with Concussion Alliance! We are excited to work with you and to get to know you better. Thank you for joining us.

We look forward to helping you get up to speed on the world of concussions in medicine and research while getting to know your fellow interns. You’ll have multimedia curricula every day, and we’ll spend time on remote teamwork and learning more about each other through social activities and group discussions. 

Our first expert guest speaker is Dr. Stephen Casper Tomorrow at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET; Dr. Casper is the leading medical historian on the topic of traumatic brain injury and related neurodegenerative disease–and a CA community member. You can check out his short profile on our website here.

Our second expert guest speaker this week is Dan Fogarty on Friday at 12:00 pm PT | 2:00 pm CT | 3:00 pm ET; Dan is a concussion patient and advocate–and a CA community member. He’s also the author of Kill the Prince, a novel about an MMA fighter struggling with persistent symptoms from multiple concussions and hiding them from his coach and girlfriend.

We’ll be starting our projects tomorrow with Project Start-Up Meetings at 12:00 pm PT | 2:00 pm CT | 3:00 pm ET; more on that below.

We’ll have our first Discussion on the 6th Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport on Thursday at 12:00 pm PT | 2:00 pm CT | 3:00 pm ET. 

Toward the end of the week, you’ll get a chance to practice your science writing before writing your real newsletter synopsis next week. You’ll write a practice synopsis and learn about our best practices in our Newsletter Workshop on Friday at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET, run by two-time internship alum Kira Kunzman.

We’ll also have group social activities this week! We’ll start with a Social Activity Today at 12:30 pm PT | 2:30 pm CT | 3:30 pm ET that will flow into our first Subcohort Meeting. We’ll have our first weekly Social Hour on Friday at 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET.

Start-of-day Procedure

I’ll outline the procedure that we’d like for you to use for starting your days with us this summer. I’ll talk more about this at the welcome meeting and include this text for each “day” page this week.

  1. Check Slack for new messages

  2. Check the schedule in #weekly-schedules on Slack, on the week page in this portal, or on the shared Google Calender (more on that below)

  3. Check the ‘day page’ (like this one) for tasks & content

  4. Check your project resource Google doc in your project folder for new resources (this will come into play starting later next week).

  5. Check in with your PM on Slack

  6. Check in with your project partner(s) on Slack (again, this will be relevant once you start your projects).

There are four Tasks to do today:

Reach out to someone!

  • Reach out to a fellow intern on Slack and set up a time to talk synchronously (Zoom, phone, Google Meet, etc.). Try to pick someone from a different school–this is a great opportunity to make connections with folks from around the country with shared interests!

Knowledge Evaluation (Please start here before you go on to look at any of the curriculum today)

  • We’ve created a short (and far from comprehensive) Concussion Knowledge Evaluation for you to complete. This evaluation consists of 26 short questions and exists to help us build a better curriculum and give us some educational metrics for grant applications. We know that everyone is coming in with a different level of knowledge, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sign up for a Project Start-Up Meeting

  • When you meet with your project partner (more on that below), you’ll want to sign up for a project start-up meeting time using this appointment slot link. Please only sign up during or after your synchronous meeting with your partner.

Concussion Alliance emails

  • [Time sensitive] Create your Concussion Alliance Google account! 

    1. You should receive an email notifying you of a new Google Workspace account from CascadiaNow! – this is your Concussion Alliance email. This account is solely for your CA email; you won't be using the Google Workspace account for your work. The link expires in 24 hours, so please sign in to the email as soon as you get it. If you don't see it, check your spam folders.

    2. Email Conor from your Concussion Alliance email as soon as you get signed in.

    3. Slack Conor if your sign-in has expired, they can send you a password reset email.

  • Once you have a Concussion Alliance email, we’ll be able to give you a Grammarly Premium account!

  • Conor can also add you to the shared Google Calendar once you send them a confirmation email that you’ve signed in.

[Before Thursday] Newsletter Workshop sign-up

Starting up with your projects!

Here are the projects and partners!

  • About Concussions: Sleep & Sleep Problems

    • Zoe Heart & Audrey Schwartz

  • About Concussions: Headaches (Advanced)

    • Esmeralda Garcia-Ramirez & Aaron Lobsenz

  • Populations: School Nurses & Administrators

    • Lillian Lee & Camilla Smith-Donald

  • Impact Storytelling Externs

    • Sylvia Dixon & Lily Vargo

  • Oral Historian Externs

    • Ella Gullickson & Sam Gossard

Project-related tasks for today

  • Reach out to your partner to schedule a time to meet synchronously today (we’ll talk about this more in the Welcome Meeting).

  • Sign up for your Project Start-Up Meeting tomorrow (also above).

  • Start looking through your project folders (we will DM them to your project channel in Slack and you’ll get a share notification in your Concussion Alliance Gmail account).

    • Project folders will have 3 templates in them: an initiation & planning template, a research template, and a timeline template. Look these over and start thinking about how you’re going to fill them out. We’ll finalize them in your Project Start-Up Meeting tomorrow.

    • Project folders will also have an Overview/resources document in them. This document gives an overview of the project and contains resources to get you started. Read through the document and start looking at resources as time allows. When you start your research project, you should go through the resources and search repositories outlined in this document first.

Curriculum for Today

We’ve provided a group of educational resources below. We’ve listed them in an order that we hope will build on your understanding of concussions as you go through them.

For Everyone

Speaker readings

  • Read this New Yorker article on Dr. Casper’s work and our related newsletter synopsis.

  • From Stephen Casper

    • Hello interns,

      We will be talking about traumatic brain injury (TBI), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and stigma. Before CTE was called CTE, normal people and some doctors called it "punch drunk" or "slugnutty". Attached to this email are several primary sources from the history of TBI as well as an article I have written on the subject. At the completion of our activities you should be able to:

      1) Define stigma

      2) Describe objective historical evidence about the dangers or traumatic brain injuries

      3) Analyze language that downplays patient experiences of traumatic brain injury or neurodegenerative disease

      4) Evaluate ways that stigma promotes injury, risk-taking, and subsequent disease

      I want you to first watch the YouTube link from about 1954: (67) Cauliflower McPugg's Last Fight - YouTube. In this video, you will see a famous Cold War Era television comedian named Red Skelton. Red Skelton played a punch drunk boxer as part of a normal comedy routine. 

      After you have watched this two-minute video, I want you to next read: Evaluation of Boxing as a College Sport. This is a secret report that was created at the University of Illinois in the 1940s. The report examines the question of whether or not boxing should be a sport at the University of Illinois. I want you to look at the survey data that the authors gather together. Notice that the university concludes that boxing can lead to neurodegenerative disease.

      After you have read the secret report, read the 1955 article in the Saturday Evening Post. In this article, a former boxer talks about his TBI and punch drunk experience. I want you to focus on what he has to say about Red Skelton's comedy routine. What else does he say about his life as a punch drunk?

      Take a look after that at the data in 1955 from the American Football Coaches Association. How many injuries and fatalities in American football do these authorities find across several years? And what recommendations do they make to keep football players safe? 

      Now that you have read these primary sources, I want you to turn to the article I wrote on the topic of malingering and brain injury. Malingering is the idea that people exaggerate their symptoms in order to receive compensation or for sympathy. 

      In this study, I show that malingering influences in two directions. On one hand, fear of malingering prevents people in need of help from receiving the help they need. But, there is an additional problem. The fact that we worry that malingering may happen in cases of traumatic brain injury, individuals with exposure to brain injuries are also sometimes forced into downplaying the harms they have experienced so that they appear to be exaggerating their injuries. Thus what I show in this paper is that stigma works to at once downplay symptoms and simultaneously harm individuals. 

      Enjoy!

For Science Writers (Optional for others)