By October, I had become accustomed to my role as an intern and understood how to do my job effectively. In addition to designing wellness flyers for November and December, I went on a few more field trips to promote general wellness and even attended an autumnal picnic by Chesapeake City Park.

In the last week of October, I was assigned a special project unlike my previous tasks. My job was to design a trifold display board to be displayed in November for National Diabetes Awareness Month. This display was to educate employees about what diabetes was and how to protect themselves from it and to advertise the various employee wellness programs that would be provided to them by Sentara if they were eligible. One of the employee programs aimed at preventing type II diabetes had a financial reimbursement incentive.

I was thrilled to have this project because it was bigger than anything I had done previously. And like with the flyers, I was allowed to be as creative and original as I wanted it to be, as long as I covered all important information and told the facts. But before I designed all of the flyers, I decided to get to work on designing a colorful border that had diabetes-related cartoon graphics. I went into Canva, my organization’s site for designing flyers, and selected a perimeter design that was appropriate. I then printed the theme on the largest size paper possible so that I could construct the border. The paper was flimsy, so I had a very difficult time making it look even and having it stick to the display. I spent a couple of days printing, cutting, and taping and restarting the process, and before long, November 1st approached, and the flyers were not all done. However, I managed to pull it together by adding some of the diabetes-related flyers that we had already made for the stairwell, adding some flyers from Sentara about the wellness plans, adding some nutritional education flyers from MyPlate, and throwing in a flyer that I made encouraging people to cook with herbs to reduce salt. When my preceptor and I ran it by our supervisor, she okayed everything except, ironically, the border that I had tried so hard to get right. But she ordered her own border on cardstock paper, and it was easily put there. Soon after, in the first week of November, my preceptor and I took the finished display down to the lobby in City Hall, and we put it up alongside some fake fruit for decorations and some flyers about the wellness plans.

My experience with the diabetes poster was frustrating and did not go the way that I had hoped, but it was educational. My preceptor and I talked about it, and I she suggested that I may have been afraid to ask for help out of fear of appearing incompetent. This was true, and she reassured me that there is nothing wrong with asking for guidance when I am struggling. I ought to have invested the most of my energy into designing flyers to go on the display, and then worried about the border second. Had I brought it up, she may have been able to order the necessary cardstock like our supervisor did. And my creativity would have shone more with the educational materials like I intended for it to. I will remember this experience in the future,.and I hope that my future employers are as understanding and accommodating as Tiffany was.