Name: Patricia
Current Year: Senior
Major: Biological Sciences
Minor: BIP
CFS Program: Field Studies in Public Health

I liked that our CFS adviser met with us individually from the beginning and checked in every once in a while. I also liked all the resources that CFS provided–from the mock interviews to the dropbox of internship information. It made CFS seem very thorough, but also personal.

Everyone worked really hard to make sure that we were learning and selecting which internship we really wanted. It was nice also that my adviser, Nancy, would challenge me on my decisions and not just tell me what to do or go along with what I thought I wanted to do. In my experience, some of the advising programs at Northwestern are very cookie-cutter and too general. I liked that the staff was motivated to prepare us all uniquely.

I conducted surveys with customers who bought products from fruit stands. I went to Chicago and State, Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, and Uptown alone, and I went to Lawndale, Cook County prison, Little Village, and Mount Sinai Hospital with my supervisors to conduct customer surveys. These were for the benefit of the food cart program that my supervisors were conducting an evaluation of. I had the opportunity to make a poster, presented at a community health symposium. I also built survey modules on the computer and entered in about 80-90 surveys total. Surveying was 80% of the internship (being out in the field), and entering data and computer work was 20%….I enjoyed being out and about in Chicago. I would have never been to those places had I not chosen this internship. I enjoyed that I was still doing research in an unconventional way. I learned about communities and really had first-hand accounts about what people were dealing with in terms of food access. It was very raw data.