Karen Baik is a communications major studying at the University of Maryland. In the fall she took the course Pollinators in Crisis by Dr. Hawthorne. Coincidentally, her TA was Nathalie Steinhauer, who is a member of the Beeinformed team. Once she had a taste of pollinators she became hooked on honey bees and will be continuing to aid Beeimformed this summer. This is her blog!
My name is Karen Baik and I am currently a junior and a communications major. I completed my communications internship with 2 credits in BSCI389. As a communications intern, I spent many hours completing and satisfying a few important objectives. The Beeinformed team’s major objective was to facilitate the understanding of the results sheets as well as improving the quality of the protocols. One example is the APHIS National Honey Bee Survey.
A quick breakdown of completing a task would be as follows: I receive a protocol from the team with the necessary tools. I read over the protocol and try to follow along with the experiment. If I come across any confusion or anything that could be improved, I take note and make sure to report it at the weekly meetings. In other words, I would go through all of the reports and protocols and make sure that they are clear. If not clear, I would edit and clarify them; further improving the quality of the reports.
In addition to the main objectives, I helped fill out the online National Management Surveys as well as aiding in improvement of the survey for the future. One example of this is the idea of creating a scantron type survey to eliminate any ambiguity in the answers. It will force the participants to choose among a certain set of answers rather than them answering the question incorrectly. Also, I received insight by other beekeepers and incorporated their advice into the improvements. These are just a few projects that I worked on with the internship.
This experience benefitted me in numerous ways as well. I developed my skill sets, improved my team working skills, and overall I demonstrated the importance of communications in all aspects of the professional world whether it was communicating within the team, outside of the team, or the participants. Lastly, I am very thankful for this opportunity and I look forward to working with the Beeinformed team this summer.
