After taking a couple of days to get to know the progressive and pro-social culture of the City of Chesapeake, I formally began my role in advertising employee benefits and promoting general wellness to City of Chesapeake employees. My job was to both promote general health and well-being and to make employees aware of financial and health-related benefits to which they were entitled.

One of my primary duties as an intern were to create and hang wellness flyers around the City Hall building. The flyers that I created had to educate employees about health-related benefits to which they were entitled and also promote general healthy behaviors. Flyers were hung every month in 4 different places: the building stairwell, the employee break room, the employee elevator, and all of the men’s and women’s bathrooms. 2 different signs were hung in each bathroom, and a set of 7 total signs were hung in the stairwell for 6 floors.

The themes for the signs changed every month according to nationally recognized health awareness themes. For example, September was cholesterol awareness month, so that was the subject matter of most of the signs for that month, aside from sodium intake awareness. I didn’t actually make the signs for September, but I was tasked with hanging them around the building. However, I did create the October signs during that time. The themes for October were domestic violence, breast cancer, emotional well-being, and health literacy. Most of these signs were geared toward general health themes; for health literacy, we did frequently asked questions and answers about our most popular wellness benefits programs.

My other primary job as an intern was to help Tiffany at our health-related pop-up events where we gave out free healthy snacks and flyers related to employee health benefits and let employees spin a “wellness wheel” for health-promoting prizes. When someone would spin the wheel, it would land on either a health-related question that the employee had to answer or a brief, low-risk physical exercise that the employee had to perform. Then, the employee could pick a prize. Prize choices typically included packs of sugar-free gum, bandage holders, manual apple slicers, mental health awareness rubber ducks, food-portioning bowls, can koozies, and other health-promoting items. Sometimes, we would pop popcorn in an authentic popcorn machine and give people free bags of fresh popcorn. Then, it would be called a “Get Poppin’ with Wellness” event.

My first month as an intern has been an educational experience. Primarily, I learned how to use my visual art skills to create informative health-related flyers and how to engage in light-hearted general health promotion. I also learned a bit about what it is like to work in human resources and educate people about their employee benefits. Finally, I have gained a small amount of exposure to cybersecurity from mandatory training. Thankfully, I have also discovered that I am pretty good at my job, according to my supervisors.