Week 1:The Beginning

Even though I am now in the second week of my internship, I want to go back and talk about the first experiences I had last week. First of all, I chose to intern at the Medical Society of Delaware for my Captstone. The Medical Society of Delaware is a community situated in a small office. Their job is to aid and inform the physicians of the Delaware area. I am currently working in the Communications area of the Society. This area deals more with written communications, such as the Delaware Medical Journal, newsletters, e-mails, broadcast faxes and more.

My first day at the Medical Society of Delaware was an exciting, interesting and terrifying day for me. I was a little nervous coming into a position I had never had any experience with. I was given a tour, introduced to all the people and, with helpful explanation, asked to complete my first task. Most of what I did the first day included editing, although I did create a subscription form for the MSD's journal, of which I am quite proud of. It looks like a subscription form you might find in a magazine, and gives information about the journal itself, as well as how to order it.

In addition to the editing, and subscription form, I was asked to write my first articles for a broadcast fax, and to write my first full article about President Obama's speech at the American Medical Association's Annual Meeting. I want to expand briefly on all these tasks.

The editing that I am required to do I find the easiest and the most enjoyable. I like being about to sit and read through these medical articles, although most are filled with medical language I am completely unfamiliar with. Mostly, I edit for style, although I do pick up grammar and punctuation errors along the way. One of the best examples of this is the % symbol. Many of the physicians use this symbol, but in the MSD Journal, they consistently use the word "percent". I feel like I picked up their consistencies very quickly. However, I am still missing some editing mistakes. I am trying, with advice from my supervisors, to take my time and edit much slower, going over the article more than twice.

In regards to the articles I am writing, I find that it is incredibly hard for me to sit down with a brief news article, and glean information from that to write my own article. For one, I'm not really familiar with what I'm writing about, and secondly, I feel like I'm plagiarizing from these articles, even if I only take a few of the words they use and spin them around. It's a very vexing part of what I have to do. I feel like I can not write well enough for these articles, and I'm terrified of plagiarizing something accidentally and having someone call the Medical Society about it. Now I want to be clear, I'm checked by my supervisors. But, I still find it increasingly hard to just write these articles in a manner to which satisfies me.

I hope to discuss this at the weekly meeting I attend with my supervisors tomorrow. But I am definitely learning that writing is a lot harder than coming up with papers for class. In addition, I've already learned a lot about bulk mail, (I even went on a field trip to the post office), broadcast faxes, medical journals and business meetings. I feel like each task I do provides me with a new challenge, and something new I can learn from it. And while I'm starting to reevaluate exactly what I consider my strengths and weakness, I can definitely say with supreme confidence, that just because you can write, doesn't mean you know all there is about writing.