Recently, I had a student email me to ask questions about the research process. I thought I would share a bit here about the summer @LanserBailey and I spent together doing the work that would serve as the basis of our recent @JAT_NATA manuscripts.

A thread.

1/

Summer 2015. I had just finished my first year of grad school. @LanserBailey was working working on her degree @UWMad_ATProgram. We had gone through all the hoops to get her set up as an official summer internship at Boston Children's where I had a research affiliation.

2/

My @NSFGRFP application had just been rejected. I had proposed the framework for evaluating the relationship between structural features of the college sports med environment & athlete injury outcomes (sound familiar?). I still wanted to do the research so...

3/

@LanserBailey would meet in @HMSCountway every M,W,F morning right when it opened. We would get the same group study room and set up shop. First, we wrote the phone script, then the IRB application. We manually pulled the contact information for our randomized sample.

4/

We created a spreadsheet for data entry and came up with rules for how data would be entered. And @LanserBailey then we started making phone calls. So many phone calls. On our personal cell phones.

5/

We left my # as the callback on voicemails. I kept my phone with me everywhere. I had the script memorized so when an AT would call back, I could go through the questions as I fumbled to find pen and paper.
On the T
At the gym
On the street
I went over my minutes that summer.

6/

Sometimes I would come back to the library the next M, W, or F to meet @LanserBailey with random scraps of paper with our precious data written on it.

She became an expert in decoding my hurried scribbles.

7/

Some days it was our AT participants that kept us going.

@LanserBailey & I heard from so many ATs how important our research was. How they wanted to help however they could. How sometimes they could not practice to the full level of their degree bc of resource constraints.

8/

On Tu & Th @LanserBailey was shadowing at a clinical site and I was trying my hardest to learn everything I could from @laura_tastic (& tbh struggling to keep up with her brilliance most of the time).

9/

But that summer holds a special place in my heart.
It was weird, for sure.
But @LanserBailey & I designed and executed a research study that was totally original.
It pulled from my health services research training, background in sports, her training as an AT.

10/

Not sure there is a takeaway here, but if there is, it's probably something like:

Research is hard, and not at all glamorous. Find questions that you care about and people who are fun to work with, because in the end they'll be what get you through the day.

/end