Name: Felicia Famularo
Class Year: 2027
Major: Sociology, Italian
Internship Organization: Bryn Mawr College
Internship Title: Social Sciences/Humanities Summer Program | Graduate School of Social Work & Social Research w/ Professor Lee
Location: Remote
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
This summer I’m working as an undergraduate research assistant for Dr. Lee in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, helping conduct a systematic literature review on intimate partner homicide, with a particular focus on the Jamaican and Caribbean context. My day-to-day work involves reading and summarizing academic articles, organizing sources in Zotero, and drafting sections of what will eventually become a paper intended for publication. So far, I’ve written the Introduction, Epidemiology, Characteristics, Risk Factors, Sex and Gender Differences, and Race and Ethnicity sections, and I meet weekly with Dr. Lee to review drafts and get feedback.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied because I wanted hands-on experience with the kind of research process that leads to real, publishable scholarship, not just a classroom simulation of it. I was especially drawn to this project because it combines rigorous literature review methodology with a subject area, gender-based violence and public health, that I already cared about going in. Last semester I took a class on femicide in the Italian department, which gave me a strong foundation in the topic and made me want to keep engaging with it in a research setting. I’m also interested in pursuing a future career in sexual and reproductive health, and this internship feels very much in that vein, since intimate partner violence and homicide are deeply connected to those issues. I also wanted to strengthen my critical reading and academic writing skills in a setting where I would get consistent, substantive feedback from a faculty mentor.
Was there anything special about how you found this internship?
My path to this internship was not exactly a straight line. Earlier this year I accepted a summer research internship with another organization and secured Bryn Mawr Summer Internship Funding to make it possible. I had actually also interviewed with Dr. Lee for a research position around the same time, but declined it because I had already committed elsewhere and wanted to honor that commitment. Unfortunately, my original internship placement fell through over the following months due to communication issues and a lack of an actual research placement, and after trying to make it work, I ultimately decided it was not the right fit. I reached out to Bryn Mawr’s Career and Civic Engagement Center, and they went above and beyond, reconnecting me with Dr. Lee to see if anything might still be available. She generously offered me a position on her research team. It was a bit of a winding road to get here, but I feel very lucky it worked out this way. I am genuinely excited to be working with Dr. Lee on this project, and I believe that the subject matter, as well as the larger goal of contributing to research that will help us understand and prevent intimate partner homicide, is deeply important.
What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn’t expect?
I didn’t expect to learn as much about myself as I did about the subject matter. During the school year, I tend to collect sources as I write. I was surprised by how naturally I settled into a system of tagging and coding sources by subsection before I started writing. It made drafting so much smoother and more efficient. I also didn’t anticipate how much this work would sharpen my relationship to the sources themselves. Verifying an original text against how it had been cited by another author became a regular part of my process, and it changed how I read secondary literature more broadly. I’m now far more attentive to the gap that can exist between what a source actually argues and how it gets represented downstream.
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