Week Eight

Hi everyone! 

I hope all of you have enjoyed this experience, and that everything is coming together as we wrap up our Senior Projects in these final weeks! This week, my survey was officially sent out to the three sample groups of medical students. Although the process ended up being a really close call, I'm glad to have received responses from so many medical students! As the finishing touch to my project, I'll be meeting with Dr. Hartmark-Hill and University of Arizona's bio-statistician to analyze my data and its corresponding trends. 

I'm excited to see how the survey results turn out; hopefully my hypothesis that medical students practicing narrative medicine hold more value for patients and have better patient outcomes will be supported by the data. While I've been waiting for survey responses to trickle in, I've almost finished constructing my research paper. This has been an interesting challenge for my project in particular because the experiential results are so subjective. In the past, my academic research papers have been prominently objective with numerical data and graphs to support correlations and trends. Since narrative medicine is a field which is both subjective and objective, it's been a bit of an obstacle to find the right balance for a deliverable. 

After searching for previous academic papers on narrative medicine, I was able to form a structure for my paper that will include the numerical survey results, but rely heavily on experience-based data. As such, I've completed my abstract, background, introduction, and methodology sections with a focus on the workshops and lectures I participated in for training. Once I get my finalized data, I will finish up the results, discussion, and conclusion sections by integrating a social outlook into the numerical values. 

Aside from the paper, I've been working on my PowerPoint slides to reflect my study. I assure you progress is being made, but I'm realizing "Is this important?" and "Is this interesting?" are two questions with very different answers. 

It's exciting to see that after being the architect of my own study, I'll finally be able to hold tangible evidence in a field that is so new and still developing. Even though my Senior Project is close to an end, I feel that this can act as my launching point for an even more intricate study in college. It's been truly fascinating to see how much social perspectives can impact scientific procedures, and even more eye-opening to see how much we neglect that fact. I'm thankful to Dr. Hartmark-Hill and the physicians I was able to interact with for recognizing a hole in medicine that is often overlooked, and I admire their drive to re-humanize it. 

Thank you so much for checking in every week! 

Anivarya