When Robert Rosas began his 10-week National Evaluation Center (NEC) internship, he was met by a sea of data.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2022\/09\/Robert-Rosas-300x300.jpeg\")
\u201cIt was amazingly inspiring to watch Robert, Stacy, and Loida dive right in and work hard to get over some steep learning curves,\u201d says Matt Carson, PhD, head of Galter Library\u2019s Digital Systems Department, member of NEC, and internship mentor.<\/p>\n
For Rosas, staying afloat meant learning how to better communicate with the NNLM Data Warehouse, which contains information from the early 2000s until today.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy favorite part of the experience was querying the data warehouse, which exposed me to real-life data and allowed me to practice my Structured Query Language (SQL) skills,\u201d says Rosas, a student in the University of Southern California\u2019s Master of Management in Library and Information Science Program. \u201cBeing exposed to situations that a data scientist might face \u2014 such as the need to tidy data before using it \u2014 allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the data management process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosas, along with Stacy Carter and Loida Pan, were among eight students from throughout the country participating in the inaugural NNLM National Center for Data Services Internship Program<\/a>. The goal of the program was to provide graduate students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups with practical experiences and skills for obtaining data librarian positions. Other NNLM partners hosting summer interns included the Data Curation Network, and NYU Health Sciences Library.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I certainly polished both my SQL and data visualization skills this summer, my biggest takeaway from the internship was the realization that I really enjoyed working with data,\u201d says Pan, who is pursuing her master\u2019s degree in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. \u201cOne of the best parts of the internship was meeting the mentors and getting the opportunity to hear from data librarians about their positions. I also enjoyed getting to know Robert and Stacy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was less concerned about results and tried to encourage them to focus on the process so that they would develop an appreciation for the real-world challenges that arise in this field,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Carter is a graduate student majoring in Health Informatics at Morehouse School of Medicine. She used the internship to familiarize herself with GitHub and SQL, while working to create visualizations of the top zip codes with the most NNLM subaward activities for 2021.<\/p>\n \u201cData is a powerful tool that can guide almost any decision-making processes,\u201d says Carter. \u201cNearly every future career path requires knowledge of some form of data science, meaning that data skills equate to job security, and I think this internship has placed me on a path to success.\u201d<\/p>\n The 10-week program culminated with presentations by each intern and Carson hopes to take what he\u2019s learned about the internship and from the interns them self to develop even better programming in year two.<\/p>\n This project has been funded with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), under cooperative agreement number UG4LM01234 with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library.<\/p>\n Written by Roger Anderson<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Robert Rosas began his 10-week National Evaluation Center (NEC) internship, he was met by a sea of data. \u201cIt was amazingly inspiring to watch Robert, Stacy, and Loida dive right in and work hard to get over some steep learning curves,\u201d says Matt Carson, PhD, head of Galter Library\u2019s Digital Systems Department, member of… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2981,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ICUo-1L5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2981"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6763"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6773,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763\/revisions\/6773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2022\/09\/Pan-300x300.jpeg\")
Carson helped structure the internships to be a learning experience more than anything else, allowing the interns to get their hands dirty and see what it’s like to work with real data.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2022\/09\/Stacys-Profile-Picture-300x300.jpg\")
\u201cThis was the first time we worked with the NNLM Data Warehouse in this way, and I was excited to see what each intern would find as they explored it,\u201d says Carson. \u201cTheir enthusiasm was contagious, and they coupled their own interests with the available data to come up with some very interesting research questions. I really enjoyed watching them learn how to use different technologies and tools to get the answers they were looking for.\u00a0 They were eager to get to work, and even though much of this was new and probably felt like drinking from a firehose, they weren\u2019t discouraged. It was fun to watch them progress through the project and help advise them on additional resources and future career paths.\u201d<\/p>\n