IU Indy Health Communication
Hi! My name is Tara Callahan (they/them). I am an undergraduate student at IU Indianapolis, double majoring in Communication Studies and Medical Humanities and Health Studies, with minors in Community Health and Medical Sociology. Currently, I work at Meijer in the clothing department and in the ePortfolio Studio at IU Indianapolis. My studies are focused on Health Communication, which is why my majors are a little all over the place! I am really excited to grow as an emerging professional and learn so many new things with my LSHI internship at the site Kids HealthCast!
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​Please feel free to continue viewing my ePortfolio to view my development and internship experience!
Learning Goal #1: I want to grow professionally and maximize my time, getting as much experience as possible
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Relevance: This will, in general, build up my professional skills and career readiness.
Action Plan: Tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities I'll do to meet this goal are:
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taking control and ownership of the podcast and every aspect that comes along with it
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presenting myself in a professional manner and getting experience doing so in a lower stake environment
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exploring different opportunities that come from the community partners paired with rotation for pediatricians.
Progress: I have had a lot of success towards this goal! LHSI and Kids HealthCast has given me a lot of opportunities to build my professional facing persona and feel more confident moving forward! I had some challenges when I first started out, feeling a bit uncomfortable with taking control of the room when I needed to, but I was able to push myself and become more confident the more I did it. The most obvious example of this is feeling more confident when I am the one everyone is looking to for further instruction or advice, like when I am manning the soundboard.
Learning Goal #2: I want to gain something tangible out of this internship, something to put on a future eportfolio or to draw from on my resume or job opportunity.
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Relevance: This will build my ePortfolio and arsenal of things I can reference in the future from my time in undergraduate studies.
Action Plan: Tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities I'll do to meet this goal are:
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taking on the majority of the podcast work, being the 'ceo' with my co-intern.
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creating post and raise engagement on the Instagram/general social medias
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migrating the podcast program with the IU School of Medicine page, growing the accessibility of the podcast.
Progress: This is the most obvious goal that I achieved! I have taken a lot of charge here, and I have already begun populating my personal ePortfolio with things from this internship. Once I am done, I will have a built of page for this, and have tangible artifacts to pull from!
These images are posts I created to go along with the monthly uploads. Created on Canva or Adobe Photoshop!
Learning Goal #3: I want to expand on my knowledge in public health and community outreach, applying what I have been learning in my courses
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Relevance: I am unable to get as much classroom experience in public health, so this will cushion what I could not learn in these classes and give me better context on application of these skills.
Action Plan: Tasks, responsibilities, projects, or activities I'll do to meet this goal are:
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attending extra meetings or presentations as I am available
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check in the embedded Canvas course to take in as much information as I can
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be entirely involved in the genesis of what this podcast is, how it services the community, and how it will affect and help families.
Progress: I have made a lot of effort towards this goal! I feel like I have some more real world experience in community health and understanding of public health in general. I met with Dr. Deanna Reinoso, and talked to her about her career successes and why she loves to do what she does.
Internship Goals
My current (Fall 2024) career goals are to work in health communication, ideally with a heavy community health orientated angle because of my passion of health literacy, focusing on health disparities, and interest in health campaigns. I am current unsure of graduate school, but it is something in my future plans! I am pretty sure of this career option, but I am not against this shifting at all, either into more of a communication professional focus or a public health centered approach. I will find out if these goals fit my strengths and preferences by pushing myself out of my academic comfort zone next semester, and work to expose myself to new opportunities!
Looking back on my Internship (Spring 2025), I still feel pretty confident in my career planning journey! I know I still want to take a heavy public health centered approach, but I am considering graduate school much more than I was before. In internships moving forward, I really would like a purely public health or community health experience, because I now have both the health communication and pure communication experiences (LHSI for health communication, ePortfolio for communication). I am pretty confident in where I want to go now, but I am also even more aware of how many other things I can do.
I have made a lot of progress towards my goals that I identified in my LHSI application! I highlighted more talk about patient advocacy, and while at the time I meant more one-on-one advocacy, I have really expanded my ideas to more widespread, community outreach advocacy. I still am just as focused on health disparities, just health disparities at a much larger level.
Career Goals
I am already using communication skills and my team work or collaboration skills. I have been put in a situation where I had to think quick and come up with a solution, which I did and I am working to create a plan for future interns to know what I did incase it happens to them. Also, I am working independently with professional correspondences and not relying on direction from my supervisor to get stuff done.
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Looking back on my time at LHSI, I would say I have definitely grown in both my communication and collaboration skills! These were things I was already confident on, but Kids HealthCast gave me the option to build on it even more. I know I am growing because I do not feel nervous sending emails to the residents like I was the first time, and I am applying this to my new role at the Institute for Engaged Learning.
Learning
I would like to learn to truly trust and allow myself to take full control of my role. I think I still feel a bit iffy about everything, and allowing myself to truly put my all in it. This is not to say that I am not committed, but it is new territory to me and I would like to hesitate a bit less.
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Moving forward, I would like to be more open to criticism. I already am open to receiving it, but I want to work on how I move forward from it after and being able to critically reflect back onto it. I am making efforts towards this already at my new on campus job, which is a lot of receiving feedback on work and applying these changes.
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This internship has given me a deeper understanding of my course work because it has given me direct application and some hand in what I want to do. It also has helped refine me and my future plans, helping me find what I am truly passionate about! I achieved this through conversations with my supervisors, seeing the scope of the work, and feeling truly passionate about the program and what the impact is. I think the most solidifying moment of this for me was when I had a discussion with Dr. Deanna Reinoso for one of my class, PBHL-S315, Community Organization for Health Promotion. Her story really inspired me and feel more confident in my decision of my studies!
Internship
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About the site, my workplace, and
my successes and challenges in this experience!
About the Internship
Kids HealthCast, my internship site, is centered around an advocacy project, a child health focused podcast. We have a resident physician rotation, with pediatrician from the IU School of Medicine, that engages with the community for advocacy, health education, and family support to improve the health and well-being of children. We ensure that we reach a wider audience by ensuring they discuss and cover the topic in an accessible way, and our podcast has made an impact in twenty different countries according to our download data!
Image featuring podcasters from episode 122, COVID-19 Vaccine Update, Kawasaki Disease, Navigating the Medicine Aisle, and Contraception.
Internship Artifacts: Visual Elevator Pitch, Showcase Slide Deck, and Download Data Depictions
Visual Elevator Pitch
This is a visual elevator pitch I created for my internship site, Kids HealthCast. I created it on Adobe Photoshop, and used a stock image for the kids piled up on the side.
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This elevator pitch flyer went through a few rounds of editing by peers and advisors with LHSI to get where it is at now!
Showcase Slide Deck
Data Depiction, Country Downloads
The graph to the right shows all of the countries that have downloaded or viewed an episode, including the United States. 10,749 downloads came from the United States alone.
To the left shows the same data, excluding the United States. This includes 100 countries and 4828 downloads across those countries.
I am coming into this internship with solid communication skills from my communication studies major coursework, along with a really strong work ethic, high attention to detail, and adaptability.
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My previous work experience conditioned me to be a reliable team member and self-accountable, even if it is in a different context.
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My second job right now is at Meijer, and I often work alone or with a team (both without management). I have learned to stay accountable and on task even when not being directly supervised, which has contributed to my overall work ethic.
These are all valuable things I bring to the table at my internship, and my hope is that these will allow me to build my knowledge on community health and health advocacy throughout the internship. While these will help me complete my internship work while I learn and grow, they are also valuable to my future career plans in health communication.
My team role adapted throughout the internship as I fell more into a groove of things! I started to get used to delegating task a bit more with my co-intern, allowing her to take the reigns a bit throughout our time together.
Our contributions together impacts the larger project by:
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Keeping the podcast running
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Migrating episodes cross-platforms with the IU School of Medicine Website
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My work and effort always made an impact with my internship and team as we are integral to how the podcast and show stays running! We also helped kickstart the growth and accessible of Kids HealthCast by getting the integration process started.
Workplace
Successes and Challenges
Successes
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One of the specific times I have felt successful as an intern was when I solved a tech issue that my supervisor could not figure out. We lost the SD recording card, and my supervisor was really worried about it, not being able to resolve it on her own. I managed to figure out a way to record it differently so our recording time did not go to waste! I figured out that I was able to do this by referring to my supervisor and take the information she was getting from their technician. This problem solving made me gain some trust with my supervisor and build problem solving skills!​​
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Another time I felt this same feeling was when I started working on integrating our podcast episodes onto the IU School of Medicine website, meeting with someone from outside of my work department to do so. I was very nervous starting it, and it was very technically challenging to work out. My supervisor helped support me by helping me get in contact with the outside person and give me the space to work on it! She also has been super supportive and grateful that I am doing it, because it was not initially part of my responsibility. Overall, this success helps me gain both experience with a new program, but gave me the chance to gain some professional interpersonal strength as well!
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This success has followed me through since I first wrote about it. I feel more confident learning new programs, being able to say that I am easily adaptable, and having the ability to pick up new things quickly. I have already applied this transferrable skill to my current on-campus job as an ePortfolio Ambassador, learning Qualtrics and building my analytical abilities.
As time has gone on, I have managed obstacles as they pop up, mainly with technical issues that arise day-to-day. This will help me in the future by allowing me to be resilience and work under high-stress environments.
Challenges
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The most obviously challenging thing to learn was to pick up on all of the technical things I needed to learn. We had to go through how to record the episodes, operating the board, and then move onto the editing side of things with Adobe Premiere Pro. I struggled a bit, but now feel confident! My supervisor got me into contact with the person to teach me the program, and now I am applying it to other parts of my academics! It was, and is, a super helpful skill to have! Just putting myself out there and pushing myself to learn allowed me to grow.
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Another challenge was more recent with migrating our episodes, it is tedious to go through the backlog of episodes to get everything cleared up and into the website program. As mentioned above, because this is also a success for me, my supervisor was super supportive and expressed her gratitude for me taking initiative and actually getting this part of the job rolling! It has been something she has wanted to do, and I am excited to get done. I went through the steps of contacting the person I needed to, and have begun learning the new program!
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My internship team help me overcome this challenge and obstacle by giving me space to ask for help and connecting me with the proper resources. The more technical things of my internship is not something that my supervisors do, but they acknowledged that it was not within their skill set and routed me to those who could help me. My team also role-modeled that skill for me, making me feel comfortable asking for help and being up front with things I cannot do.
This connects back to what I said about being able to learn new programs; the challenge of picking up a new way of working can help you battle any challenge you come face to face with. I have also used these skills I got from using Adobe Premiere Pro in my on-campus activities. I am involved with The Communication Network, and we are starting to implement media and content creation into our club. I conducted a little Adobe Premiere Pro workshop for a few individuals who were interested to foster skill building for more people! I have attached the flyer I made in Adobe Photoshop to the right!