Temi Adegbola is a rising senior at Livingston College, Rutgers University where she majors in Public Health.She decided to participate in Project L/EARN because she wanted to take the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the range of health care disparities, what causes them and what could be done about these disparities. Temi’s future plans include completing the five-year bachelors/masters program in Public Health offered jointly by Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. From there Temi aspires to attend medical school where she can incorporate her interests in health care, public health and health care disparities.

Through Project L/EARN, Temi was able to learn how to work her way through a research problem and evaluate it all the while trying to minimize error.She mentions that it’s one thing to learn about research in a class, but putting it into practice is a very valuable experience.Temi also says she learned a lot about the research process at the FRC IV conference this summer. It introduced {her} to Community Based Participatory Research, a topic that {she} previously did not have a lot of experience with. {She} realized the advantages and disadvantages to different research approaches and hopes to be able to incorporate them into future research. While being challenged to think about concepts in new ways, Temi also learned how to manage her time and produce quality work by their deadlines.

Temi worked with her mentor, Dr. Shawna Hudson, on a project examining how patient attitudes factor into physician decisions to refer patients to cancer clinical trials. Temi appreciates how Dr. Hudson challenged her to look further into results and ask questions about the outcomes as well as conducting further research on the new findings.The challenge helped build her expository skills in research.Appreciative of the opportunity to be part of Project L/EARN 2008, Temi advises future interns that you must be dedicated to your tasks and what you put into to the program is what you will get out of it.