By: Gianna Swan
As I started my very first year of an Ogallala Commons internship, I had several questions and was a little bit nervous. Going to the Ogallala Commons retreat helped both answering most of my questions and calming down my nerves a little bit. The orientation retreat also taught me a lot more about how to show good leadership and encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone. For example, at the retreat, everyone was randomly placed in a different group. On the last day of the retreat you would get with your group and have to come up with a presentation based on a certain aspect of leadership that your group was given. The group that I was in had to present on communication in leadership. For our presentation, we made up two different scripts that showed different forms of communication. In all, the orientation retreat helped me grow in leader ship and step out of my comfort zone and meet new people. On the first day of my internship I still felt slightly nervous, but at the same time excited. I started off my internship by helping out at the Haxtun Health fair for my community service hours. At the Health of fair I worked at the blood drawing station, by bagging the blood samples after they were drawn.
My non-community service hours mostly consisted of working in the marketing building with Julia Biesemeier, but I did also work in the nursing home for a couple of days. The major project that I worked on was helping plan Haxtun Health’s annual golf tournament. For the golf tournament, I had to make a list of vendors including their mailing address, main contact person, and what sponsorship level they wanted or if they were just donating. Besides the vendor’s list, I also had to make prescription bottles filled with a few tees, one golf ball, and a hydro drink packet for all the people that will be participating in the golf tournament. I also worked on starting to make more welcome bags for any new community members in Haxtun. I had to contact local businesses to see if they want to to put anything in the bags and then I would start to fill the bags. During my internship I had a few other small projects such as making patient boards for the nursing home, a radio ad, and an Emergency med books for the ER. For my clinical hours a job shadowed in the nursing home and observed in the Emergency Room.
