I’ve been attending the medical internship as part of the Future Leaders Program in our school for a few months already. As part of this internship, the doctor asked Paula and I to design a poster to promote the vaccines that they’ll be selling in the next few months. We put a lot of effort into this poster to ensure a good balance between visuals and clarity. From doing research into the vaccines and their diseases to designing the layout of the poster, and to the final stage of asking for approval from the clinic team and putting the elements of the poster together, I learned a lot about teamwork throughout the process. Because we were able to distribute work amongst the two of us, we were able to choose the kind of tasks we want to do, and those are usually the skills we’re better at. For example, I was primarily responsible for doing the research since I’m better at synthesizing information from different sources due to my greater fluency in Chinese compared to Paula. Paula, on the other hand, was mostly responsible for the logistics involved, such as buying and cutting the materials and planning the design out on canva before actually doing it,  as she is more of a detail-oriented person. Being able to have another voice was definitely a plus in this process, but we also had dissenting opinions occasionally, and that led to a delay in our decision-making process. We were ultimately able to talk things out and go with one solution or compromise by finding a middle ground. Nevertheless, I found this process of learning to step up and/or step down at times very valuable.

Another profound realization from this activity was me being able to recognize the ethics of choices and actions. It’s sort of intuitive to put only the favorable aspects of a product out there when you’re promoting and advertising for something. This isn’t always true, and working in a medical setting helped me realize that especially. With knowledge comes responsibility, and as medical workers, we hold the responsibility for the patients as well as their health. Despite the need to make money in order to sustain the clinic’s operation, it’s more important to stay true to our values and morals. Therefore, while making the poster, I tried my best in ensuring an unbiased and neutral information presentation; using an informative instead of persuasive approach to let the patients understand why they may or may not need the vaccine.