just wanted to share · Rishab Academy

Oct 3 (edited) in Self Improvement & Motivation

just wanted to share

Compared to the research and projects everyone else is doing (seriously, y'all are on fire - keep that up), this may not seem like much, but when I found out, I was literally on cloud 9 and I just wanted to share (this is gonna be a long post). And also I'm just so grateful to whatever holy magic divine intervention thing is helping me. So, to backtrack, this summer, I had this internship (Emory Next Gen), and it's basically a (6-ish week) STEM and research exposure program. In all honesty I didn't think I was going to get in and I was prepared for that "We regret to inform you ..." email, since I was under a lot of stress during the application timeframe (I actually lost my period for almost 3 months because of it) and submitted it maybe 2-3 days before the deadline.

But going back to the internship. We had a final symposium, and it wasn't like a "look at the big research we did" kind of symposium, more like a "look at what we did" presentation. We had tons of freedom in how we wanted to do it (The article about this year's cohort talks about that: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2024/07/er_nextgen_genetics_internship_16-07-2024/story.html), and for mines, I made a "Choose your lab!" animated RPG 1980s game style video of everything we did. I put a lot of effort into it; I was on a time crunch of about 1 1/2 weeks-ish, and ya girl is a novice in animation and videomaking to put it simply (guess what video-editing tool I used .... ✨Canva, the PPT alternative✨).

When that article came out, my symposium wasn't mentioned, and I was pretty sad, but at the same time, it didn't really matter, because I was really proud of my friends (one kid's presentation got quoted so many times, and I wasn't even miffed, because his presentation was incredible), and they were really impressed with my video, which was all I cared about (if you see the video *I'll link it later*, you'll see how it was catered to us). Anyways, it got pushed to the back of my mind, but then, yesterday, I got an email from the program director saying that they're adding my video into the information page for the program, and that THE DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL MEDIA AT EMORY WAS IMPRESSED BY MY VIDEO AND THEY WANTED TO KNOW HOW I MADE IT. Now two emotions going on:

1) pure joy from my video getting that much recognition

2) imposter syndrome, because even though it took a long time, much of the grunt work was taken care of by the Canva transitions (though I had to do a lot of experimenting with them), and I only really animated the character, plus there's some glitches in my video.

BUT THE JOY WAS THE REIGNING FEELS. Like HUH IS THAT MY NAME????? *insert key smash*. Oh, this is the page btw: https://med.emory.edu/departments/human-genetics/next-gen.html

And again, it's not much, because even though it's on the Emory Youtube, it's not listed, but I was just so happy I'm technically kind of known to some Emory folk, since that's my dream school (aside from HYPSM, but that's a much much farther dream).

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