Health service administration is a field in healthcare that focuses on planning, directing, and coordinating health services. I recently had the opportunity to intern with the Old Dominion University (ODU) Center for Global Health. My exposure to the center was focused on gaining practical experiences, knowledge and skills in the field. Not to mention, the experience helped me understand how the health system operates using the necessary tools and technology to offer services to the community. As part of my duties as an intern, I was assigned projects and assignments such as designing a phone call script, researching major related jobs on Indeed, researching community resources for Norfolk and Chesapeake, and was recently working on a project involving COVID-19. I also interacted with the community through community events. Furthermore, the following summary would reflect how the internship has helped me.
          Firstly, some professional goals I needed to earn before the end of my internship were applying basic public health science skills using evidence to develop research, increasing communication skills, and developing analytical and assessment skills. As a matter of fact, I have been able to accomplish all these goals and more through the assignments and projects I worked on throughout my internship. For instance, a fellow intern and I worked on a project, which was focused on finding health indicators in Franklin County, VA, and how to improve the community health by using interventive measures to combat the problem. This project helped me utilize the knowledge I gained from certain classes such as Population Health, Public Health Science, and Managerial Epidemiology to gather the necessary research evidence to create a review on the health issues. Furthermore, I met my communication skills goal through the assignment on designing a phone call script for an interview. I conducted the interview by calling the participants to ask them specific questions relating to the research. In addition, I earned my analytical skills by taking large amounts of the data collected through the survey and transferred it on to an excel sheet to help analyze the trends in the community over the time period to produce results.
          Secondly, some courses relating to my major that has helped me learn during the internship are : Population Health, Community Health Resources and Health Promotion, and Health Ethics and the Law. The knowledge from these courses such as the health ethics class helped me understand the importance of legal and ethical concerns relating to confidentiality and privacy laws associated with patients and healthcare centers. For instance, when I was working on the Nutrition project, I was told to use numbers to label each participant on the research project to protect their identity. Equally important, the knowledge from population health and community health resources recently helped me on a project where I was assigned to research community resources that were off the city’s radar in Chesapeake and Norfolk for seniors to have more access to community resources. Not to mention, this classes were helpful to me because they taught me what to expect in the work field.
          Thirdly, some knowledge and skills I gained from the internship are job awareness, teamwork skills, interpersonal skills, and self-reliance. The skills above are some of the professional skills I gained through the internship. Self-reliance focuses on how I was able to work independently on certain assignments such as the Nutrition project. In addition, I gained more interpersonal skills when the center volunteered to help with a Mobile Pantry event in Chesapeake where I had to interact with people to identify their needs. While job awareness exposed me to the different career options to explore and to know my interests in the work field.
          Likewise, some challenges associated with some of my projects I faced were reaching out to participants during the phone call interview, inaccurate data entry process ,and issues associated in creating survey questionnaires. The phone call interview process was challenging because the participants were hard to reach and at times hanged up or said this was the wrong number. Furthermore, my challenges with data entry was a bit hard because I had to learn how to use excel in creating analytical report on how the data had affected the communities.
While the survey questionnaire process was challenging as well because I had to create the questionnaire to meet the purpose and needs of the survey by asking unbiased questions. In addition, I was able to resolve these challenges by asking for guidance from my supervisors. This experience influenced my learning process to help me gain lot of knowledge and influenced how I resolve issues.
          Equally important, some benefits of internships are gaining work experience and developing professional networks. While the purpose of the internship is to apply the knowledge and skills learned from the class in real life situations.
As a BSHS student the internship experience was beneficial to me because it gave me a first-hand exposure of working in the field and also taught me the skills I needed to gain entry level positions. Before, I started this journey, I did not expect to get a lot of have exposure due to the fact that it was a site on campus, but my classes throughout the years have helped me understand the basis of the field and have showed me what to look for when I start working in the real world.
          Lastly, effective supervision are the factors involved in using specific methods to provide a suitable working environment to all employees. Some advantages of effective supervision are accountability and improved work efficiency. My overall impression of the supervision experience was outstanding. The reason behind my impression grade is because I received great supervision from my preceptor through feedback and effective communication to improve my work ethics, and had the opportunity to pick and choose certain projects I wanted to take part in. In all, my experience was great in a way that it encouraged me to apply most of the knowledge I gained through my classes into my internship.