Animal poaching is an activity practiced around the world. The purpose of poaching is to be able to obtain the valuable goods from an animal, which could be created into decorations, clothing, medicine, and eventually sold for thousands of dollars. These activities are usually done illegally, and could easily lead to the poaches getting fined or put in jail.

Poaching had already been illegal for hundreds of years. The activity had first began around the 1700s, mainly for survival purposes, such as obtaining food as many people found it difficult to be able to provide food for themselves and their families. Throughout the years, the crisis of animal poaching worsened, leading to the population of animals to decrease. Not only do poachers illegally kill the animals in order to survive, the poachers also kill them for clothing, decor, etc., which is quite useless as other materials, that does not require harming animals, could also be used to create the same product.

In my opinion, I believe that animal poaching does not benefit us, but instead worsens the environment and the ecosystem around the world. Society has drastically progressed over the past decades, which would allow us to be able to obtain food easily, instead of needing to kill animals illegally. The medicine created by rhino horns do not have any actual medicinal values, but some patients might see results due to a placebo effect. Decorations and clothings can be created by hundreds of different materials that are not able to harm animals in any way. There are always several alternatives to switch to, instead of harming the environment.

The product that I am making for my project is a display of an elephant tusk. While presenting it to my audience, they would be able to gain a better perspective and idea about what the elephant tusk looks like. When creating the display, I made sure to produce minimal waste and to also be as environmentally friendly as I can, by using recycled paper and not buying new materials.

During the FLP Internship program, I had participated in working in two dental clinics, which gave me a better idea of how it is like working as a dentist, and what I would need to know as a dentist. Throughout the process of the internship program, the learning goals that I had worked on were mostly communication and gaining my knowledge on dentistry as I often had to communicate with my mentors in order to be able to fully understand their tasks and the different procedures that they were performing. While communicating, they had explained the use and importance for different tools that they had used during procedures, and also shared more about why it is important to practice good dental hygiene.

With my experience of the internship program, it broadened my idea of whether or not I would want to consider dentistry as a future job. Although it might not be the most suitable job for me, working as a dentist still seems quite interesting and fun as I would be able to learn more throughout the process of working, and also create new relationships with the people around me. What I had expected from this program was that I would be able to learn more about dentistry and the important details about it, and what I did not expect from it was that I was able to actually observe and watch dental surgeries. From what I had observed, the surgeries were really fascinating and it surprised me that a lot of the patients did not feel any pain from their teeth getting pulled out.

Some of the skills and abilities that I had to put in during the internship process was communicating, being professional, and learning. For communicating, I had to communicate with the mentors so that I would be able to learn throughout the process and procedures; sometimes, I had to also communicate with the patients, answering any question that they need, or giving them direction on what they should do. This helped me learn more about how it is important to have a good relationship with customers / patients and how it would benefit us. While working on these skills, I had to also stay professional, keeping the patients comfortable by not creating a nuisance.

Overall, this internship program had taught me a lot that I would definitely have not been able to teach myself. It increased my knowledge about dentistry, and gave me a clearer mindset about the future jobs that I would want to consider taking, and what I would want to study when I get into college.