By Evans Berreondo Giron, Remote Summer Program 2020
Going into this summer, I knew it was definitely going to be one for the books. I had never had a remote internship, never mind one that was not focused in the life sciences. I had always been a bit afraid to explore different areas of study, however when I came across the Remote Summer Program proposal from Dr. Matías Irigoyen Testa at La Universidad Del Sur, Argentina I felt like I had to work with him and his research group.
The overarching project that the research group has been working on for quite some time was doing economic analysis on consumer protection rights. However, with the unexpected pandemic, they decided to shift their focus towards analyzing institutional responses for the prevention of COVID-19 in the United States and Latin America. As someone who is very focused on going to medical school, I thought to myself that it would be very important to learn more about and analyze the responses that different countries are having to this critical problem.
When beginning to work with the group, the first issues that arose had to do with the language barrier. While my Spanish would allow me to speak with anyone about how their day was going or about what their favorite pastimes were, I was not prepared for what was to come. Everyone in the research group was either a lawyer or was in the process of becoming one. During meetings they would be talking about how a certain response in a city in Argentina violated Law 21A-bcg (or something along those lines) and I remember sitting there on the zoom call nodding my head as though I knew exactly what was going on. Over time as I became more comfortable with the information that was being thrown around, I was able to contribute much more significantly to the conversations they were having.
As to the specific research that I conducted during my 2-month period with the research group, it was a little different from what everyone else was doing. While the rest of the group was doing research much more focused on law, Dr. Matías Irigoyen Testa, knowing my interest in pursuing a career in medicine in the United States, decided that it would be interesting for me to look at the COVID-19 case statistics in the USA. I compared different states given their number of cases per capita. It was incredibly interesting to see how different approaches worked for different states. For example, while in New York State it was much more important to go into quarantine immediately, that was not necessarily the case with states such as Montana where the population density was incredibly lower. Through this research I was able to learn more about the state of the public health crisis in the United States and definitely believe that it will allow me to become a better doctor in the future.
One of the many highlights of this experience was the ability to learn about Argentinean culture. Although at first, I was bummed that I would not be able to travel to South America for two months, I quickly began to realize that the RSP was also presented an incredible opportunity to learn about Argentina. Through the RSP leadership we were able to learn about the Argentinean culture every week through a variety of presenters; I was also able to have weekly meetings with my research group to talk about everyday life. I learned about mate, I learned about tango, I even learned about asados. It was truly an incredibly rewarding experience that I will never forget. I am immensely grateful to everyone, particularly María José Ferreyra and Magdalena Richards Donnelly, for making this possible.