Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual assault.

Hi everybody! My name is Alex Natelson and I am a rising sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, but I am super excited to be taking part in the SEED/Rice 360 internship this summer! This whole experience has been completely new to me as my background really isn’t on the bio side of things but I’m really enjoying it so far! I am a part of Team PIPER, which stands for Pediatric Instructional Pelvic Exam Resource, along with my teammates Elise, Shannon, and Shivani.

 

So far a lot of this process has been education-based with us spending a lot of our time doing background research on this topic since we aren’t all that familiar with it. We were able to speak with our client, Nancy Harris, and pick her brain on all of our concerns and questions surrounding this project. She really helped us out by giving us some resources to go off of and helping us to refine our research into one specific aspect of pediatric assault, the post-assault pelvic exam. This exam is what our project is intended to help make more clear in making a pelvic model for nurses to train on. All of the first week was spent doing workshops on problem evaluation and research, and then conducting that research.

 

This week, we have focused more on design criteria and brainstorming. We had a couple of workshops on designing for clients and usability, and my team has been working hard to identify what we need to include in our model. This has been a little more difficult for us, since we’re working almost from scratch, so we have to consider a lot of factors in our design. We have a good amount of design criteria right now, so we’re working on narrowing those down and combining criteria into full solutions. I’ve had an amazing time so far getting to know everyone in the internship, and I feel like everyone is really starting to bond now so I can only imagine how close we’ll be at the end of this. I’m super excited to continue my work with my team and I really hope we can make an effective solution!