My Pinhead internship was unique in that it was with Pinhead itself. Last summer, there was still so much uncertainty because of the pandemic. My interest is in business, and I wanted an internship. However, because of the pandemic, I knew it had to be local. I had volunteered for Pinhead previously, and respected Pinhead as a superb science education nonprofit. Of course, their internship program is the most visible program they have.
Nana Naisbitt, the founder of Pinhead, suggested that I gather as much information as possible about previous internships. She thought that a business research internship that focused on data analysis would be a good fit. Nana said she had started the internship program in 2003 by writing grant proposals and that the first three interns were sent in 2004 to the Smithsonian. I sent a formal proposal to Sarah Holbrooke saying, “The purpose of this internship would be to help Pinhead compile data about all of Pinhead’s past internship placements in hopes of increasing donations around Pinhead’s 20th anniversary in 2021.” Sarah asked that I formally apply to be an official Pinhead Intern, which I did and was accepted. Sarah agreed that the data would be helpful.
I learned that there was no single repository of past internship information. No one knew how many past interns there were. No one knew how long the average internship was. No one knew how many different internship types there had been. No one knew if the internships inspired students to pursue a STEM major in college or if those students continued on to careers in STEM. There were so many unknowns.
I set up a Google Sheet as preparation and populated it with 18 different data point categories. I
did not know at the time that there were 267 past and current interns and more than 4,000 data points to be gathered. It was probably a good thing that I didn’t know this at the beginning.
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