In July 2020, Metis launched its inaugural paid summer internship program for New York City high school students. Throughout this week, we are featuring each of these dynamic and talented young people and their important contributions to Metis’s work. This morning, we are delighted to present Sinmiloluwa (Sinmi) Afolabi, a rising senior at the Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy who is supporting the research team directed by Dr. Susanne Harnett. We selected Sinmi, and her two fellow interns, from among more than 300 who applied for the three program positions.
Sinmi is spending her time helping her assigned team members with a variety of research tasks. She created an annotated bibliography for a literature review on family involvement in education. Sinmi received job-embedded training on using SPSS and conducted an analysis of survey data for a teacher leadership project. She is also supporting several arts education research projects by summarizing qualitative survey responses, creating frequency charts, and populating tables related to program participant characteristics.
When asked about her summer internship thus far, Sinmi commented, “My experience at Metis has been very welcoming and educational. My mentors make sure I understand the tasks I am assigned and are always there if I need to ask questions about the research field or questions about going to college in the smartest and most efficient ways. I’ve learned a lot about what happens behind the scenes in professional research facilities, and the type of software I will hopefully be also using in the future as a possible fellow researcher.”