Sana Allana (she/her), a 4B Biomedical Engineering student, gives us a look into the various co-op jobs she has had and the important lessons she has learned from these experiences.
Sana has completed a total of six co-op work terms:
- Work term 1: Gillam Group Inc., Project Management Intern
- Work terms 2 & 4: University of Waterloo, Advanced Interface Design Lab, Research Assistant
- Work terms 3 & 5: The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Bioinformatics Research Assistant
- Work term 6: Johnson & Johnson (J&J), IT Business Analyst
One main project that Sana worked on during her fourth co-op at the Advanced Interface Design Lab was in collaboration with a master’s student.
“She was creating this clinical decision support system, which is kind of like a decision support system for a clinician to diagnose sepsis,” says Allana. “Initially, it started out as something more in-house, and then we ended up collaborating with SickKids since they were also creating something similar for their interface there. We were working on the human factors side.”
“So we interviewed different clinicians and nurses, and basically, a lot of health care workers that worked at SickKids that would use their program there [...]. We asked them what their needs were, what their priorities were, how their day-to-day looked like, and if we implemented a decision support system, would this help you in your processes?”
“From there, after we had some prototypes of the actual system, we did a usability test. I was also able to do some of the recordings and then also analyze the usability by understanding things like, ‘how many times were they able to use the system without any errors?’ Or ‘how many times did they need help from someone in to understand how to use the prototype?’ From the interviews, I was able to conduct an analysis of a qualitative data set, which was kind of cool, I’d never done that before.”
Another project that Allana worked on was at her last co-op at J&J. She was responsible for creating a dashboard that highlighted Walmart's e-commerce data. “E-commerce was really big and they wanted to display all of the e-commerce data appropriately. Walmart has its own systems for its delivery service. They also use Instacart and they also have their own pickup and delivery. The data wasn’t available on the dashboards so that’s something the marketing team wanted.”
“I was able to work with different customers and figure out how they wanted it displayed on the dashboard and relaying that back to the IT team. Then we did a usability test of deploying the dashboard in the QA (quality assurance) environment, and then we did a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) to be like, ‘okay, are these numbers matching your data,’ and as long as it matched, and as long as it looked the way that they wanted it, then we can move it into production.”
How do you think working in various research/analyst positions has helped you develop yourself?
“In terms of technical skills, like coding for example, I feel like I learned the most in my co-op terms. During school, I have taken part in many projects that would be group work. In a group, there's one person that's gonna be better at one thing than another, and you split up work based on what you're good at.”
“So, I feel like before I worked at, for example, SickKids, I was not as good at coding. I didn't know how to write my own scripts, especially scripts that ran on multiple data files at once. In school, I could rely on other group members. I'd be like, ‘oh, someone can help me out to get the job done,’ but it makes a big difference when you're doing it alone. My co-op opportunities helped solidify the foundation laid in my course work, and gave me more confidence when working in teams for school.”
“I feel like that's something that I was really happy to gain out of working, especially at SickKids, because the employer that I worked for, he was also a professor at U of T. I feel like, in a way, he was kind of teaching me all the time. Whenever I would ask him anything, he'd always be like, ‘I think you can figure this out yourself.’”
“He would let me have time to grow and learn on my own, which I think was really great because, in the long run, it helped me become a better team member, coder, and researcher. I got to experience independent, hands-on, technical work from working there, which was really nice and something I am super proud of!”
Do you have any tips/advice for people interested in working in research?
“If you have a resource like a professor or someone you know who maybe has a lab, or if you even do research, you can search up different professors in your program and just send them an email saying, ‘Hi, I'm really interested in your research.’”
“I don't think any professor would be upset at that and would be open to help. Obviously, you have to do research into their field and understand what they're doing. If you want to go to grad school you'd be doing something like that anyway, so it's good practice to learn how to talk to a professor.”
“If your grades are something to brag about, then send them your grades and say that these are my experiences, this is what I'm interested in, and create that relationship. I think professors are one of the easiest people you can talk to because they've been in your shoes so they know what it's like. I would say definitely just reach out [...] to them. I'm sure everything will be okay.”
What’s next for you?
“At the moment, I’m looking at a bunch of different options but I am 90% sure that I’m going to be doing my master’s. After my master’s, I hope to work somewhere in the industry. I would say that I’m going to complete my master’s first, and then after that, hopefully, research for a company in R&D (research and development).”
