Senior Brooke O’Connell works at her desk at the Food and Drug Adminstration. She has been given the rare opportunity to begin working in a professional environment as opposed to a classroom setting.

by Lucy Hurlbut ‘14

When senior Brooke O’Connell started looking for internships over the summer, she never dreamed it would be at one of the most important administrations for the federal government – the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

O’Connell works specifically in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in the Office of Surveillance and Biometrics (OSB). She has a specific sponsor within the OSB who gives her tasks to complete such as applying the unique device identifier (UDI). This puts a barcode on medical devices so they can be tracked. The OSB looks into whether devices are functioning properly and continue to look at their functionality once they reach the market. “Companies enter information into the UDI database, and I organize that information into a spreadsheet,” she explained.

The process of finding an internship she wanted proved to be quite an ordeal for O’Connell. She is interested in engineering, but getting an engineering job as a high school student is difficult. O’Connell did have experience from a civil engineering firm internship she did her junior year, but it was not enough of what the engineering businesses were looking for. “It is very difficult for a high school student to get an internship with a tech company, because there’s not very much we can offer with not a whole of experience or credentials,” O’Connell explained.

She worked closely with Judy Reiff, Sherwood’s internship coordinator to find an engineering company for which she could work. A woman at the FDA saw O’Connell’s resume that Reiff had sent out to multiple places. The FDA worker set up an interview to discuss O’Connell’s engineering skills and attributes, and the internship at the civil engineering firm. Soon after, she was invited to intern for the FDA. That woman became her sponsor. “I went from jobless to having an interview at the FDA of all places; somewhere I never thought I would be able to work at,” she stated. The job at her civil engineering firm helped her get the job at the FDA.

Though the internship is unpaid, it could become a paid internship if she continues through the summer. O’Connell goes three days a week, but she does not have a set schedule for every week. Working with her co-workers in a large office gives her a real feel of what it is really like to work in a professional field and not just be a student.

Despite the lack of more engineering-related tasks, O’Connell feels the FDA has given her the opportunity to be exposed to a traditional work environment. “It shows me that engineering is very versatile. You can have a traditional office job or something more hands-on. It just depends on what you’re looking for,” she said.