My name is Nael Al-Assaad and I currently attend Wentworth Institute of Technology working toward my bachelor’s in computer science. I tasked myself with finding an optional internship for my Summer 2022 semester. This path led me to my college’s job fair where I was introduced to a PROMETRIKA. The team representing PROMETRIKA explained daily responsibilities at the company, a clinical research organization that mainly focuses on oncology and rare diseases. After hearing more about the company, I gave it a shot and I applied to their positions. A few weeks passed and I heard back from the team asking if I’d like to be interviewed for a different position, their Data Management Intern position.
After multiple interviews, PROMETRIKA welcomed me to their company. When it came down to choosing which internship to join, PROMETRIKA seemed like the best course of action. The funny thing is, most of my family are in the medical field, so when I picked computer science as a major, I wasn’t expecting to work in a related field. May 23, 2022 was my first day of the internship; having previously worked at a grocery store, I could feel the drastic change in the working environment and atmosphere. I could tell that all the employees enjoyed working there.
This motivated me to do the best I could, and I made sure I integrated with the team. I was first involved with manual data checks, which made sure that the database had no errors. This alone kept me busy, as I wanted to make sure I got everything correct. I worked closely with another Data Manager who answered any questions I had. She made sure that I understood every manual check, and this knowledge would help me in the future.
After finishing my validation checks, I began to learn new software the team was curious about. The name of this software was Business Objects (BO4), and I began to explore its capabilities. My manager wanted me to use BO4 to accurately find all the pages with entered data and all the pages with no data. There aren’t many tutorials showcasing BO4, so I had to figure it out myself with guidance from the team. Thinking outside the box, finding patterns, and always trying something different was how I was able to complete this task. After quality checking my report multiple times, I was able to create an accurate pages entered/pages not entered report for any study.
During my internship at PROMETRIKA, I personally created these reports for 7 different studies, and I created a tutorial for how to create one. Learning BO4 from scratch taught me how to educate myself and how to think outside the box. I took what I learned from BO4 and created reports that would help with manual review of the database. I believed I could automate the manual checks with BO4, so I gave it a try. From this initiative, over fifty validation checks were automated or made easier to validate. During my second review of manual checks, I was able to identify errors at a faster rate. For any task, I learned to ask, “Can I create a report for this?” PROMETRIKA changed my mindset to be a more detail-oriented. Now, I catch errors in my own work, projects, and lifestyle, a great skill to have as a coder.
