Intern Experience at Yonsei University

One of the things that I'm doing over this summer break is working as an intern at the Developmental Psychology department of Yonsei University in Korea.

To start off, a little bit about Yonsei University:

• One of the oldest universities in Korea

• Very prestigious 

• Has a variety of courses

• A lot of foreign students come to study

• Honestly, the campus looks really beautiful

About how I got this role:

• Talked to my prof about summer internships, thought junior year summer would be better for me to do research 

• Mom wanted me back in Korea, so I started looking into lab assistant roles in Korean universities 

• My best friend from high school is a student at Yonsei, so naturally, I felt drawn to it

• They were looking for summer research assistants

• I filled out the form, sent my resume, and after a while, the professor got back to me and conducted a brief interview.

• I got the job!

The time commitment was significantly less than I initially thought I was signing up for, which was great, since I was doing this unpaid and just for the experience. As my lab professor always says, if you do a job as a volunteer, you should get to choose how much effort you put into it. I didn’t get to ‘choose’ per se, but this was good enough. 

My work was mainly the following:

• Helping children adjust to the lab environment before the test began

• Explaining what the children would be doing in the tests, what the research is trying to accomplish/look into, and addressing concerns from the parents

• Taking part in manually collecting data (eye tracking — coding whether or not the kid was looking at the screen)

• Organizing data from the results of the experiments in Excel (the experiments I helped with were all in the early stages of data collection, so no statistical analyses were done)

• Reformatting test results for easier tracking of data (i.e, converting files, renaming files, formatting the structure of numeric data)

• Contacting parents for follow-up questions and keeping track of scheduling/resolving issues related to scheduling

• Translating English measures into Korean to be used in surveys for parents

• Scanning paper forms into PDF files for easier access and storage, basic lab set up and cleaning, and learning how to use certain machines

• Transcribing LENA audio files of children’s day-to-day conversations/interactions with others with appropriate commentary and additional information. 

My favorite part of the job was playing with the children before they did the study. As you can see, I had a very fun time making things for the children with MagneTiles.

I have mixed feelings about the transcription work that we were assigned every week. It was kind of fun, since it felt like I was getting an exclusive sneak peek at the child’s life (the conversations were honestly so funny to hear). However, this work stressed me out the most, and I really had to push through to get myself started. It took so much mental energy to go through, over and over, the same bits and pieces of the recording. The quality was never good since the mic was in a jacket. I could hear rustling all the time, and sometimes I would be transcribing different noises and sounds that the child was making while playing — it was always a dilemma whether to put another ‘ah’ at the end or not 😂

Sometimes the child and others would talk over each other, and it would be up to me to figure out what each individual said. And it’s not like they always announce their names, so I had to really think who said what. And when the kids got excited, they would scream. Like full-on, ear-splitting roars. (RIP my hearing, if the kid were to shout or get physical while playing)

Even still, I had a lot of fun and was constantly laughing to myself at the random choices of topics or interesting responses to the parents’ questions. I’ve never met the kid, but I certainly know a lot about what he likes to talk about! 

My time working at Swarthmore’s developmental psychology lab was really helpful, even though I was starting. I knew all the ‘big important words’ like the IRB, pilot studies, measures, etc. I was surprised that, despite the experiments being conducted in Korean, most of the collected data was formatted in a way that used English for initials, abbreviations, and key terms. This actually helped my understanding a lot. 

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to experience the Korean research field in psychology. There’s definitely a noticeable difference in how the labs are set up and what gets prioritized, but at the moment, I feel more comfortable working in research settings in the US. It just seemed more of a ‘let’s do this all together because we want to know the answer to this question’, not ‘I’m doing this because these people told me to’. I’m not saying it’s like that for everyone and every lab, but that’s just how I thought when reflecting on both sides of the research scene. 

Hopefully, I can build on this experience to further improve my skills as a researcher. I think in the project for Talking Tech (which is the one I've been working on for a while), the second study is supposed to have a lot of video coding and transcriptions. I would definitely be up for the challenge.