Undergraduate Jieun Kim joined the UTILISE team for 3 months from May to August 2024. We loved working with Jieun! Here Jieun reflects on her experience:
“Hello all, my name is Jieun Kim, and I am an undergraduate student originally from South Korea who just turned junior (Year 3) at Mount Holyoke College in the US. It feels nostalgic and really nice to reflect on this wonderful summer back by writing this blog post.
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at the UCL Cognition and Grammar Lab, working on the UTILISE project under the guidance of Professor Varley, Kerry, and Claudia. Reflecting on the past few months, I’m filled with a sense of gratitude for the experience and the insights I’ve gained.
One of the most impactful aspects of this internship was working with participants who have aphasia. Observing their interactions during sessions and the focus group gave me a deep appreciation for the complexity of communication and the challenges people with aphasia face. It was humbling to witness their perseverance, and it made me even more committed to supporting work that could help improve their quality of life.
The technical tasks -- like navigating the British National Corpus and working on data spreadsheets -- were equally enriching. Though at first, some tasks seemed new, I quickly realized how much I was learning about research methodologies, data management, and the precision required in linguistic studies. Transcribing speech for hours on end taught me patience and attention to detail, and it was an opportunity for me to study subtle phonetical features of individual speech production. Also, creating accessible materials for people with aphasia made me understand what kind of help people with aphasia might need.
Overall, this internship gave me more than just new skills -- it broadened my viewpoint in terms of the language sciences and allowed me to perceive the complexity of interdisciplinary areas in neurolinguistics and speech-language pathology. I’m incredibly grateful for the support I received from the team and for the chance to play a small role in research that could help individuals with communication difficulties. It was a summer of learning, growth, and connection, and I’ll carry these lessons with me as I move forward in my studies and career.
I would like to appreciate again every experience, kindness, and warm welcome from everyone with my whole heart, and I wish all the best for the research as well as their personal lives 🥰 “