My name is Shad茅 Chrun-Tremblay, and I am currently a U3 student pursuing an Honours Anthropology degree with a minor in Economics. This summer, I worked as a research assistant for a UdeM public health (ESPUM) research project called 鈥楲evelling the playing fields鈥�. This project seeks to study the effects of Play Street (PS) and School Street (SS) interventions in four neighbourhoods in Montreal, with a special focus on the differential effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on children's free play, independent mobility, and active transportation. My work mostly consisted of coming to the office every day from 9:00 to 4:00 and doing diverse administrative tasks such as editing questionnaires, writing out consent forms, helping with literature reviews for future publications, and carrying out in-field data collection in the afternoons through door-to-door recruitment. I had been working on this project since last October, so I knew the project very well, but I was not as involved as I was now, working as an intern this summer.
During my internship, my biggest challenge was balancing my own personal life and the internship. To recruit parents for our research, my team and I had to go during peak times to specific locations in order to convince parents to fill out our questionnaires. This often meant going to primary schools at 7:30 AM to catch parents dropping off their children in the morning and doing door-to-door recruitment on Sundays or at 6:00 PM during the weekdays when parents were at home. Even though I was supposed to work 35 hours per week, I ended up working sometimes 40 hours per week and even worked on Sundays. Furthermore, in addition to working as an intern this summer (which I did not receive academic credit for), I was also balancing working on my own personal undergraduate honours thesis (which was unrelated to this research project), which proved to be much more difficult than anticipated.
Another interesting challenge I faced was the failures faced by the research project itself. Given that this was a pilot project, my research team and I were faced with many unforeseen issues in the project such as low participation rate, lack of time, small sample size, short-staffed etc. Especially in low socio-economic neighbourhoods, it was extremely challenging to recruit parents for our research due to language barriers, high illiteracy, and little access to computers. Though I was initially frustrated by this fact, I quickly realized that this was a part of the research process, and we were eventually able to write an academic paper about the issues we faced in recruiting from low SES neighbourhoods. This taught me that one can make the most out of anything, even in the worst of conditions.
Finally, going into this internship, I had the intention to gain some experience in the field of research and wanted to ask my supervisor for a letter of recommendation to apply for grad/law school, but I was terrified they would say no. After attending different AIO seminars, I decided to communicate my time management issues to my supervisor and even asked for a letter of recommendation. They gladly accepted and even allowed me to come to work later in the day if I stayed working late the day before. They even congratulated me for all the hard work I had been doing which really made me feel appreciated. This taught me the importance of communicating clearly with my superiors and setting boundaries at work.
What I found out about myself during this internship was that I really enjoy the regularity of going to the office every day and I really enjoy having workmates with whom I can chat during the day. I also really enjoyed the research aspect of the job and working on my computer all day. On the other hand, I enjoyed less doing door-to-door recruitment as I am quite introverted, and it can be very emotionally exhausting to see a lot of families from low socio-economic neighbourhoods living in such poor conditions. Nonetheless, going door-to-door really helped me improve my public speaking, confidence, and social skills. Two of the highlights of my internship were contributing to the redaction of a paper titled 鈥淗ard-to-reach鈥� populations? Challenges and strategies for recruitment and primary data collection in low socio-economic status neighborhoods; the case of Montreal which will soon be published in the International Journal of Public Health (IJPH) and visiting a lot of different neighbourhoods in Montreal such as Rosemont, Ahunsic, and St-Michel that I would have never visited on my own if it hadn鈥檛 been for this internship.
All and all, I highly enjoyed my time as a research assistant. I would like to thank the King family and the McGill Arts Internship Office for this incredibly insightful experience which taught me a lot of valuable lessons, both personally and professionally.
Thank you again for this incredible opportunity, words cannot express my gratitude.
