Am I a Real Learner?
After about two and a half months of internship in the Indonesian Journal of Health Administration (IJHA), I finally finished my internship today! The internship actually took a month to finish. However, because of midterm weeks and other reasons, I finally finished my internship today. From this internship experience, I learned how hard it is to manage time between classes, my organization’s activities, and college tasks. Therefore, I really am grateful for Ms. Khair’s understanding of their interns’ situation and for letting us having breaks in the internship, so we can focus on our activities. Thank you and love you!
In the final week, the first task given to me was to register IJHA to an indexing website that I found on the benchmarking task. I read the conditions at a couple of indexing sites and decided to register IJHA to the CORE Indexing. At the other indexing sites that I found, they need fees and has a quite complicated way to register. The CORE Indexing was the only one that had a very minimum condition. The only condition was that the journal needs to be indexed by OpenDOAR and DOAJ. As IJHA is an open journal and indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ), the registration was very easy. While my intern friends needed to fill forms with details of the journal, I only need to reach out to the CORE team via email with IJHA’s OAI base URL so that the CORE can harvest IJHA’s article through the link. Their team responded the next day and I was very happy for their reply as it also indicated that my task is also clear!
Another than that task, I was also given a task to invite 60 (Indonesian and International) reviewers for IJHA. This task required me to find the emails of 60 potential reviewers. I just found out their research interests and matched their respective position if they are agreeing to be IJHA’s new reviewers. I was shocked when I was given this task, as I know this kind of task should take a long time to finish. Also, it needed lots of work and time to find 60 researchers or lecturers with appropriate research interests with IJHA’s main focuses. I finished this task in about 3 days, with midterm tests and visitations to Primary Health Centers in between those days. These past four weeks were the busiest week ever in my college life. I was so happy to be able to finish this last task!
To summarize my whole internship days, it really was full of ups and downs for me. At first, I intended the internship was just to spend time during my holiday. I did not expect the internship to finish this late and really challenge me both my skills and time management. At first, hearing about journals were sounded very new, hard and honestly uninteresting for me. But I took the risk to register myself to the internship program to force myself increasing my writing skills and to learn better right from the journal’s insiders. As the internship really gave me a clear idea of the journal workflow and activities, I finally knew that the works done inside of the journal is really is not as easy as it seems. For me, it really took passion and love of writing and literature to be able to endure the duties. Honestly, I do not think I can pursue a career in any journal office too after I know how the journal works. I also will definitely submit my article to the journal far from my Letter of Acceptance due date later when I am about to graduate, I promise. Hehe
As an intern, it was really challenging me to do things that I have never done before while also pushing me to meet the standards. Revision and more revision is one thing that I get used to now. It does not sound as hard as it was before to me. My expectation before joining IJHA’s internship was definitely fulfilled. I feel like I have become more hardworking and a perfectionist on my writing tasks while also finding some things easier. For example, managing my reference list, differing articles sections and knowing what to do and what not in writing articles. The internship tasks and content are very applicable and helpful for me as a college student. As the chosen intern, I am thankful for this chance that I got and thank you so much IJHA’s team for being so supportive and very patient to me. To my intern friends and IJHA’s team, I love you all 3000!!!
