Meet Our Team!
Special thanks to our Rutgers MBS advisors Dr. Karen Bemis, Dr. Christie Nelson, Director Alissa Bookwalter, and Dr. Rupa Misra for their continued guidance and support throughout the semester.
Fiona Shafer, Team Lead Spring 2021
Looking at this site today, especially our survey results, I am so proud of the work we were able to accomplish as students. I can remember the day, back in October 2020, that I proposed we seek Institutional Review Board approval for a COVID survey. Little did I know that in the coming months, I would gain a plethora of knowledge about the IRB process specifically. It was so rewarding to collect the survey results and analyze them in conjunction with professional testimonials and secondary sources. As team lead, I took responsibility for a variety of tasks including, but not limited to, scheduling, meeting notes, and contacting various professionals.
A special thank you to those who volunteered their time to meet with our team and share their insight into vaccine development, medical care, and business reopening. Additionally, I want to express my gratitude for our wonderful Rutgers MBS advisors: Dr. Karen Bemis, Dr. Christie Nelson, and Director Alissa Bookwalter for their continued guidance and support throughout the semester, both personally and professionally. Lastly, thank you to the entire student team for your devotion to an admirable topic! It has been my pleasure to grow with the project for the past two semesters.
Shrey Joshi Team Lead Summer 2021
This project was a great opportunity for personal growth in a vast amount of skills. Most importantly, we wanted to create an aesthetic platform for anyone to come and learn about the pandemic through the means of our survey data, interviews with professionals, summarizing news, and social media data analysis. Our project started with acquiring CITI certification, constructing a survey on Qualtrics, and working with the eIRB to get our survey approved. Through this process, I was able to learn about the development behind getting a health related public data survey approved and what type of questions to ask as researchers given our final data collection goal. Working on the mechanics of Qualtrics was also very beneficial as I was able to learn about the interface in depth and feel extremely comfortable using it coming out of this project. Finally, understanding the kinks of working with the IRB was very beneficial as I have experience with what goes into getting a survey approved. Our next step included working on the distribution process of the survey, sending it to a multitude of hospitals and doing outreach work to get our numbers up. This was also a great opportunity for me to learn about how a distribution process works and all of the hard work that goes into finding targeted contacts and convincing people to help us distribute. The next step included selecting individuals for our interviewing process and coming up with the questions for the professional we were interviewing. This experience really helped me strengthen my soft skills by being part of a professional conversation with industry professionals. This may have been one of my biggest takeaways in the project with feeling comfortable talking to accomplished individuals working the industries that I hope to work in, helping me understand how to build my future network. Also once again, understanding what questions to ask as researchers and how to improvise our sequentials during a conversation helped build the skills I need to be a future researcher. After all of our data collection, I helped with creating the Canva poster slide decks containing all of our survey data & interview quotes. Additionally, I initiated work on the Wix website platform to develop all of our data to be displayed. I worked on making the website as aesthetically pleasing as possible, user friendly, and getting all our data placed. Additionally, within the site I felt that there was a need for another section that could highlight some of the great work being done at Rutgers university and Rutgers COVID-19 news. I wrote little blurbs of the cool projects that took place and recent news. We also thought it would be cool to add some sentiment quotes and memes from the Rutgers reddit forum and other social media about COVID-19 related topics. We worked on gathering different quotes and uploading them to the site for some added fun content. Along with working on all of these technical skills and hard data, I also saw major growth in my professional and soft skills. From being prepared to all of our weekly meetings, to always asking questions, being friendly, and engaging in all of our conversations. Additionally, getting to build relationships with the people on my team and getting to connect with my advisors was a great thing as I was able to take away so much from everyone's diverse backgrounds. Through our numerous presentations this semester I also felt improvements on my ability to publicly speak and have confidence in myself. I feel that this project was something that I needed in order to elevate my skills to apply in a real industry professional environment and learn how to be a leader. I have gained the tools and knowledge of how a project works and really the freedom one has to determine the outcome. We had full reign on really anything I wanted to explore and took advantage of that to fully develop amazing skills, connections, and a great final product on our website. All in all, I thank MBS for this experience and for the connections I have gained this semester! Most importantly, I would like to thank every individual that put in their time and effort on making this project successful!
Nora Asker Team Lead Fall 2021
This externship and working on the website has been a great learning experience for me, as I have been able to connect to so many different industry and healthcare professionals since I started. As a rising sophomore at Rutgers I always wished I had more resources to help me understand COVID19 during my first year. I am proud to be a part of a team that is working towards creating those resources for the Rutgers community. I truly enjoyed working with the rest of the team to figure out which data sets to collect and which survey questions to include. I also got the amazing opportunity to interview a professor I had in my first year at Rutgers, and we were able to learn so much from him about COVID19 and the vaccines. Now more than ever, clearing up misinformation and fake news is vital, which is something our team focused on this semester by bringing in experts to speak about the vaccines and their effects. I have learned so much from all the information we gathered, and I hope that it proves useful to other Rutgers students. I look forward to continuing this incredibly informative project and all the information that we will continue to gain.
Wahhaj Khokhar
I was actually looking for a way to help out my community in terms of the pandemic. By surprise, I got selected for this project as part of “COVID-19 Exploration” and it blew me away about how much I could really do from home. I’ve never really dove deep into public health projects and being part of this one was definitely an adventure. I got to meet some amazing individuals with the same mindset of helping out. As for my personal progress, I worked with the survey team on different tasks. This included creating survey questions, editing/assessing them, working on survey distribution/means, etc. Additionally, I helped in finding contacts and interviewing them for our interview quotes on our website. I really couldn’t have done it without the help of my peers. From this experience, I definitely learn how valuable it is to have everyone on the same page when it comes to projects, how we can use our backgrounds and experiences to build something, and understanding the process of IRB approval for surveys. It was definitely a worthwhile experience.
Faizah Rahim
I have learned great things from this externship such as teamwork, presentation skills, and communication skills. In this project, I helped come up with some of the survey questions as well as upload them onto Qualtrics. I helped plan where to distribute our survey and sent out our survey to many groups of people. I came up with a list of contacts from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, so that we can distribute our survey to many healthcare workers. I also learned some graphic design skills by using Canva to display our quotes from our healthcare worker interviews and our survey results. I also learned a lot about public health and public perception on vaccines from our survey results. It was fascinating to see how people felt about the vaccines and the government’s handling of the pandemic. This project not only helped me with developing my soft skills, but also helped me learn about the world around us and the public’s views on this pandemic.
Adarsh Patra
This externship allowed me to yield the skills I have developed the due course of my time at Rutgers and applying these to a professional environment. In light of the pandemic we are facing, I was able to enhance my ability to communicate in a professional and timely fashion and work in collaboration on a project to the greater good of the community. Alongside this, I have enhanced my skills in data analytics and visualization- integrated mass pools of data from Excel and Tableau and applying them into the maps and figures you can see on this dashboard today. Alongside this, through communication with notable professionals in the healthcare industry, I was able to receive insight into the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of working for the benefit of human health- and plan to take that mindest in the future projects and career experiences to come.
Tyler Lee
The externship was a great way to develop soft skills like organization, teamwork, and communication, and hard skills like working with data using tableau, SAS, and Excel. In particular, I learned some basics of team management, such as how meetings are set up and how to track individual processes. In terms of hard skills, I learned some fundamentals of text-mining like how to filter through noise words and develop word frequency clouds from large public datasets. I was surprised to learn the particulars of how health surveys are approved for public distribution. I’m happy to say that this project was fulfilling--I learned a lot!
Abdul Ahmed
Being on this team of driven and established individuals helped to create a mindset that would not only reflect on each other, but would also go on to to reflect on the entire team as a whole. Our problem solving, product creation, and presentation all went hand in hand be it dashboard or survey. We all worked together in establishing ourselves as more than just undergraduates working on a project. Instead, we are a team comprised of diverse skillsets and backgrounds who can apply ourselves in a project of any depth. Individually, I learned what it meant to be a part of a coordinated team while simultaneously having to bring what I have to offer into the mix. Working in the team to perform data analysis, scientific outreach, and data extraction, my individual hard and soft skills were amplified to match that seen in a professional setting.
Jason Lee
The externship allowed for personal progress and growth such as: managing time effectively, staying organized, and developing teamwork skills. I was able to seek discomfort and it was a catalyst for reaction which promoted growth opportunities. Also, I was able to learn various software such as Tableau and Excel that I found to be potentially useful in the future. I learned a great deal about the IRB selection process and what it takes to distribute surveys. Additionally, it was a great learning experience to analyze and interpret data and use software to visualize data instead of looking at raw numbers. Also, the externship allowed for contact with medical professionals that opened up a whole different view point.
Janki Patel
This externship was a great opportunity to develop new skills and connect with industry professionals. Working on the project helped me gain a new perspective and bust some myths on COVID-19 by interviewing experts to speak about the vaccines. I enjoyed creating survey questions, gathering new data to visualize, and finally updating the dashboard for the Rutgers community. In addition, it was fun to create vaccination guide and Fall 2021 Covid-19 guideline posters on Canva for the students. I am proud of all the updates we have made this semester and I hope the dashboard keeps being updated in the future as well.
Sreya Vadapalli
Covid-19 Exploration externship was a great learning platform for me. This journey has improved me with diverse skills like communication and presentation skills; poster making, and the usage of visualization tools. I value the opportunity to be able to contribute to people and society during the pandemic. Through this externship, I also have had a chance to connect with healthcare providers all over the world who delineated a location-specific understanding of the current pandemic scenario. In addition, I’m glad to connect with all my amazing fellow teammates who not only made this expedition a platform for knowledge exchange without any discrepancies but also made sure it was super fun!
Quraiz Najmi
I am Quraiz Najmi, and I am an MBS student concentrating in analytics. It was a pleasure to work with CCICADA on the project COVID-19 exploration. I learned a lot with this project about the opinions of different people about COVID-19 and also about vaccines. After the survey was circulated, I gathered the data and performed several visualizations and analysis in Tableau, available on the website. This enabled me to understand firsthand the opinions of different populations, ranging from students to industry professionals, about the ongoing pandemic and vaccines. Once again, it was a great learning experience along with my incredible team.
Jermaine Grif
This externship was a great opportunity to develop new skills and connect with industry professionals. Working on the project helped me gain a new perspective and bust some myths on COVID-19 by interviewing experts to speak about the vaccines. I enjoyed creating survey questions, gathering new data to visualize, and finally updating the dashboard for the Rutgers community. In addition, it was fun to create vaccination guide and Fall 2021 Covid-19 guideline posters on Canva for the students. I am proud of all the updates we have made this semester and I hope the dashboard keeps being updated in the future as well.