Week 1, Day 3

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 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 have our first Discussion on the 6th Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport tomorrow 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 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 two Tasks to do today:

Thank You to Dr. Casper

  • Please write a short thank-you note to Dr. Casper in this document for coming to speak yesterday! Promptly thanking professionals for donating their time is part of the professional development component of this internship, so please find 5-10 minutes to do this today. We’d like to be able to send it to Dr. Casper tomorrow.

[Before Thursday] Newsletter Workshop sign-up

Starting up with your projects!

Project-related tasks for today

  • Start looking through your project folders (we will DM them to your project channel in Slack).

    • Finalize your project timeline and roles/responsibilities breakdown.

    • Project folders will also have an Overview/resources document in them. This is your starting point for research; please go through all resources in your resource doc before moving on to new ones.

      • Start reading through resources.

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

For Science Writers

(~15 minutes) Spend some time perusing CDC Head's Up resource 

  • (~30 minutes) Spend some time perusing the CrashCourse Concussion Story Wall to hear personal stories from people whose lives have been touched by concussion 

    • Click “Story Wall” to get a searchable database where you can find stories categorized by Cause of Injury, Symptoms, and more