Week 1, Day 4

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. 

Today, you’ll have your first subcohort check-in meetings with your PMs at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET. PMs will send a Zoom link for your subcohort in your relevant Slack channel.

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 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET, run by our Science & Technical Writing Mentor, Kira Kunzman.

We’ll also have group social activities this week! We’ll start with Two Truths and a Lie on Thursday at 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET and have our first weekly Social Hour on Friday at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 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 five Tasks to do today:

Thank you notes:

  • Please write a note to Dr. Casper thanking him for speaking Tuesday. As part of showing professionalism and respect to our speakers for taking time out of their schedules to talk to us, we try to send these thank you notes back within 2 business days of their talk. You can write your note here.

  • Please write a note to Dan Fogarty thanking him for speaking yesterday; write your note here.

Newsletter Workshop sign-up

[By the end of the weekend!] Fill out your preference for the projects!

  • Please fill out this project preference form. We will be using your preference to assign projects starting on Monday next week and announcing project assignments and partners on Thursday, so please fill this out before next Monday.

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!

[IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY] Concussion Alliance emails

  • 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.

Curriculum for Today

Unit 1: What is a concussion? (~20 min)

Unit 4: Learn to write for the Concussion Update Newsletter (~1h)

Unit 5: Education on Science Writing (~1h 30m)

Sign up for this Stanford Science Writing Course (it’s free): https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite. It comprises eight hour-long units; each unit is a series of videos and a homework/quiz.

  • Week 1 - Introduction; principles of effective writing (cutting unnecessary clutter) (~1h 30 min)

    • 1.1: Introduction; principles of effective writing (11 min)

    • 1.2: Examples of what not to do (6 min)

    • 1.3: Overview, principles of effective writing (6 min)

    • 1.4: Cut the clutter (17 min)

    • 1.5: Cut the clutter, more (4 min)

    • 1.6: Practicing cutting clutter (9 min)

    • Unit 1 Homework (16 question quiz)

    • Demo edit 1 (optional - 23 min)