{"id":28749,"date":"2023-11-02T20:01:32","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=28749"},"modified":"2023-11-07T14:09:18","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T19:09:18","slug":"applied-math-insights-guide-student-intern-through-diverse-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/applied-math-insights-guide-student-intern-through-diverse-fields\/","title":{"rendered":"Applied math insights guide student intern through diverse fields"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long before her sophomore year at Furman finished up, Megan Hubbard \u201924 had a pretty good idea what she wanted to do. She just didn\u2019t know specifically how and where she would do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always knew that I wanted to walk alongside individuals in challenging positions,\u201d said the senior from Nashville, Tennessee. \u201cI thought, \u2018OK, you can do that in the legal field, you can do that in the teaching field or you can do that in the medical field.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Katherine Hough and Megan Hubbard, members of the Class of 2024, participated in the Summer Neuroimaging Intensive Research Program at Prisma Health in 2023.<\/p><\/div>\n

With help from Furman\u2019s Internship Office<\/a> and the Office of Pre-Professional Advising<\/a>, Hubbard was able to start making progress toward a future occupation.<\/p>\n

She started in Summer 2022, working in the nation\u2019s capital as an investigative intern with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really liked that, because I got to track down and interview witnesses, meet with clients in the D.C. jail, serve subpoenas and scrutinize body camera and surveillance footage,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But although she was indeed walking alongside individuals in challenging positions, she didn\u2019t see a way the criminal justice system could equip them to overcome those challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed like a lot of clients were stuck in a cycle,\u201d she said. \u201cYou get charged with something, the public defender defends you, you go to jail for a little bit, you get out, and then you\u2019re just continuing with the cycle. I got frustrated with that. I wished I was using my problem-solving skills to help extract someone out of that situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an applied mathematics<\/a> major taking courses like Operations Research, Hubbard was building a strong problem-solving skill set and insight into how to make systems more efficient, she said. Hoping to apply more of those skills, she explored another of the fields on her list the following summer.<\/p>\n

In 2023, the Townes Scholar<\/a> and Wylie Scholar in Mathematics joined the Summer Neuroimaging Intensive Research Program at Prisma Health as an intern.<\/p>\n

Teaming with students from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville and other undergraduates from around the state, Hubbard investigated the relationship between Alzheimer\u2019s disease and traumatic brain injury with the help of a high-performance computing cluster, presenting findings at the medical school\u2019s research symposium in July.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat gave me a taste of medicine and research,\u201d she said. \u201cI liked the science-y aspects of it, but now I\u2019m thinking of something where you\u2019re interacting with patients more.\u201d<\/p>\n

As her senior year progresses, Hubbard is looking for postgraduate opportunities in the biomedical engineering or genetic counseling fields.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith counseling, you\u2019re still using the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that I used in the D.C. internship, but you\u2019re also getting human contact,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re walking someone through how genetics work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stories like Hubbard\u2019s illustrate how internships can help students find direction, said Andy Coe \u201991, associate director of the Internship Office.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get to come alongside each student individually and explore those questions,\u201d he said. \u201cSome students are pretty sure what they want to do professionally, and an internship can help them confirm that. But sometimes students learn what they don\u2019t want to do \u2013 and that is still a successful internship experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hubbard\u2019s ability to leverage her background in applied mathematics in two different fields is another advantage Furman has given her, Coe said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe beauty and power of a liberal arts and sciences education is that students are learning how to think, not what to think,\u201d he said. \u201cMany of our students will spend the better part of their careers working in jobs that don\u2019t even exist yet. If they were in college just to learn a job, we would be setting them up to be obsolete fairly quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The student experience at Furman will help Hubbard and her classmates on their paths, whether they lead to law, medicine, education or some other occupation as yet unimagined, said Coe.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur students \u2013 regardless of major \u2013 are learning to think critically, communicate clearly, work collaboratively and anticipate and solve problems,\u201d he said. \u201cThose skills will serve them and their future employers well for a long time to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taking her problem-solving and critical thinking skills to both the legal and medical fields is helping Megan Hubbard \u201924 define her postgraduate path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":28751,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,50,30],"tags":[2369],"class_list":["post-28749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internships","category-mathematics","category-top-stories","tag-applied-mathematics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}