Throughout this internship, I’d been trying to work on improving my leadership capabilities as well as strengthening my sense of accountability. I’ve learned that leadership and authority don’t necessarily need to come hand-in-hand, therefore I’ve been trying to cultivate my sense of leadership by familiarizing myself with different roles and taking more self-initiative to help run the clinic. I think I’d been pretty successful with meeting these goals, as I learned to proactively seek out for opportunities as well as take the initiative in building connections. Whether it is asking the nurses if they need help with organizing the patient’s files or actively informing the patient of what their blood pressure result suggests, it is by proactively seeking opportunities and reaching out that I was able to gain valuable hands-on experience. For example, after helping the nurse with filing a couple of different times and performing pretty efficiently at the task, the nurse taught me how to use the medical registrar and allowed me to be in charge of making registrations for a couple of sessions. Even though I was mostly shadowing the doctor and the nurses when it comes to actual medical procedures, I find it pretty rewarding that I was able to actually partake in the running of the clinic. I definitely grew in leadership and accountability as trying to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, I learned to take initiative for action and recognized how my choices and actions could affect others. With that being said, this internship experience really allowed me to realize the importance of proactiveness. A really impactful moment in the clinic came when I was talking to a patient while I measured her blood pressure. She saw me writing with my left hand and asked if being left-handed felt weird because her son is also a leftie. She then proceeded to ask me if I got bullied in school or if my family forced me to change my writing preference because of it. It struck me because I thought the traditional beliefs that righthandedness is considered normal have already been outdated by now. As much as I understand that she’s questioning out of good intentions, I’m aware that she might have represented a segment of the population who’s still bought into this belief. Another example of this was when a patient with low blood pressure insisted that it was because she’s nervous that her blood pressure appears to be low and wanted me to remeasure her blood pressure again after a few minutes. Even though that is not how blood pressure works, I still did as she asked regardless because I wanted patients to feel safe in this clinic plus I know that doesn’t change her BP result anyway so why not just let her be.

I’ve known that I wanted to be a surgeon working in a big hospital before coming to this clinic. This internship, despite how interesting and memorable it is, reaffirmed my disposition. Rather than working in a family clinic, I’m more interested in working for a specialized branch of medicine with the resources that allow me to practice surgery as well as make diagnoses. Regardless, I’m glad that this internship ended on a positive note, and I was able to meet all the staff in this clinic who has been extremely kind to me over the past months!!