Internship Alum Interviews: Caroline Saksena

This post about Caroline was one in a series in which interns in the Winter 2023 cohort interviewed past interns about how Concussion Alliance impacted their lives going forward. The below interview follows up with Caroline, who is passionate about healthcare policy and patient-centered treatment. She was a biology major and neuroscience minor at Carleton College. To learn more, see Caroline Saksena's profile page. Sam Gossard, a sophomore psychology major at Carleton College, conducted this interview. See Sam Gossard’s profile page.

Skills and tips Caroline learned from her internship

Caroline created the web page “What Happens to Your Brain When You Get a Concussion?” during her internship. From her research, she learned about the neurobiology of concussions and translated that into a resource that people can access to explain why they are experiencing symptoms. She catered this web page to a broad audience, so she tailored her writing to make it legible for everyone.

I think the biggest writing skill I took away was being able to cater a presentation, a writing piece for your audience in a way that they can understand, because sometimes you'll be writing to people that have exactly the same knowledge base as you, but most of the times you won't be.

Working in a virtual environment comes with its challenges. Socially, it can be hard to connect with people, but Concussion Alliance has built-in social activities for interns to get to know everyone. Caroline also got to know her coworkers outside of the designated social times.

I think another piece I took away from the internship, unrelated to the particular projects, but as a remote work thing in general, was that it helps when you know the people that you're working with everything, but particularly with a remote team, it can be harder to get to know everyone on big Zoom meetings, and so one thing that I did was I reached out to my coworkers kind of like one-on-one and was like, "Hey, would you be interested in Zooming with me for like 10 minutes just to say hi, just because I don't know you and I think I would like to get to know you?" And I think by just doing that little step of proactively reaching out to people, that made the whole internship a lot more fun.

Her own concussion experience

When Caroline was about 15, she had her second concussion. She noticed she had similar symptoms as her first concussion and told the nurse practitioner at the doctor's office that she thought she had a concussion. Her symptoms were disregarded, and she was told she would be okay. She describes her interaction below:

"Hey, I am 90% sure that I have a concussion. It feels exactly like the last one did. Can you help me out? What should I do?"

"Oh, it's hard to tell if it's a concussion or not. Just the way you're describing it could be a whole number of other things. You might have an electrolyte imbalance, you might just need to sleep more,"

They did not give me a diagnosis, and that was really traumatic for me because for the next week or so, I had headaches, I was having trouble focusing with school, having trouble sleeping. I didn't really have any set plan for what to do.

A week later, Caroline still had persisting symptoms even though she had been told she didn’t have a concussion. So, she returned to her doctor’s office and restated her concern for her health:

"Hey, I'm back again, still having symptoms. I'm like 95% sure I have a concussion,"

They kind of patted me on like the shoulders like, "Oh, honey, I think I agree. Yeah, I think you're right,"

I don't hold grudges for the most part, but if I were to hold one, that would be one of the very few up there.

Fortunately, Caroline’s road to recovery was more smooth sailing after her second visit. She was referred to a neurologist and got her gait retrained since her running form was affected by the concussion.

How has Concussion Alliance helped Caroline discover her path forward?

Caroline has been interested in healthcare policy, so she contacted Conor and Malayka Gormally (the founders of Concussion Alliance), who put her in contact with Alan Pearce, a concussion researcher focused on sports-related concussions. Caroline was able to get insight into the high-stakes politics involved in sports concussion research:

He had a lot of political pushback against his work because I guess similar to the NFL, the AFL has a lot of money and it is counter to their bottom line to be protecting players against concussions and CTE. And so it sounds like, unfortunately, he had gone through a lot of hardships just politically in his career, but his work sounded very fascinating with neuropsychology.

His one piece of advice was that if you're going to go into the concussion research field, don't study sports concussions.

Caroline says that her internship experience with Concussion Alliance helped explain the stigma she experienced from her second concussion:

I think going through the internship experience, I felt very validated in my experiences, both from hearing about the science behind my experiences and knowing that, "Oh, if I was having trouble with writing in high school during that time, it wasn't just all in my head, it was because the connections that helped me with some projects in the past weren't there, they were broken, and I had to rewire things."

Before her internship, Caroline thought she wanted to become a neurologist. She thought Concussion Alliance would give her insight into this possible career path. As she considered various concussion treatment fields, she realized that, emotionally, it would be too close to home. Although treating concussion patients seemed not an option, Caroline is dedicated to advocating for concussion patients:

I will continue to be an advocate and educator about concussions for the rest of my life. I will keep referring people I meet around the world to check out CA website resources because they are both accessible and reputable.