Week 8.19.13

My Personal Mission Statement:
I am ready to explore any area I might be interested in, in order to determine where I want to go in life. I will work hard in all projects I take on. I aspire to have others describe me as selfless, loving, and reliable, and I will see the best in everyone.

     This year I am so excited to begin meeting with my mentor! I think that this will be a year of exploring the career of physical therapy and learning all about it. I am also interested in occupational therapy (and possibly some other related careers) so I think at the end of the year I will be able to either say, "I love physical therapy! This is who I want to be" or, "I am not so sure about this career, maybe I should learn more about occupational therapy and see if I enjoy that more". I was thinking that even if I did love physical therapy this year, maybe next year I could still be in HMP and try to intern with an occupational therapist just to see my options. Like I said before, I cant wait to dive into the next two years and see where it takes me!
     Last week during the "Perfectly Polished" meeting I learned all about being professional. One helpful thing I learned is how to introduce myself politely to new people while holding a plate of food! At first I was a little skeptical of holding food, a drink, and shaking hands at the same time, but as it turns out it's not so bad.(: I also learned that your voicemail is a very important part of being professional. If a future employer calls to offer you a job and gets your voicemail, you wouldn't want them to change their mind because of an inappropriate or immature voicemail. Lastly, I learned how to introduce two different people to each other. Instead of saying, "Mr. Bob, I would like to introduce you to Mr. Dan," it's, "Mr. Bob, I would like to introduce to you, Mr. Dan." Also the more important person goes first in the introduction, so in this case, Mr. Bob is more important than Mr. Dan. All three of these lessons have helped me learn more about how to be professional, and I think the "Perfectly Polished" class was very productive.

Week 8.12.13

     First off, being in Honors Mentorship, a program that connects students with mentors where they can learn about what they love, is an honor and a privilege. I'm so excited to get started and meet with my mentor. I will hopefully be working with a physical therapist and am very eager to learn more about what they do on a day-to-day basis. To prepare for the day I meet my mentor, I've read a handout called "Getting to Know Your Mentor" and listened to a podcast that explains how you should act on the first day of a job/internship.
     The "Getting to Know Your Mentor" handout was helpful because it gave me a lot of questions I could ask that I wouldn't have thought of before. For example, I would love to ask my mentor something like, "What did you do right after you got out of high school" or "What do you love most about your job". This would probably give me an understanding of what I should aim for when I get out of high school. Freshmen year I job shadowed a physical therapist for a project, but I only got to go for a day. While I was there I was trying to ask as many questions as I could without being bothersome; however, I only got a limited umber of questions asked and answered. Now that I will be able to go hopefully at least a few days a week I am ecstatic to be able to ask questions whenever I want (without doing them all at once). 

     As for the podcast I learned a few things that can not only help me at this internship I'll be doing, but it could also help me at my job. I'm a front service clerk (bagger) at Publix, and I started my job about 2 months ago so I'm still relatively new compared to most of my co workers. This podcast gave me many tips like I should only talk 20% of the time while I should listen the other 80% of the time. It also said to track my own accomplishments and I think that really helps me because I've never thought of that before. Overall the podcast taught me lots of great stuff about how I should act at my mentorship and even some tips I could use at my current job.
     These two resources were great to have and helped prepare me for not only this program, but also the real world later on. Like I said before, I'm very eager to meet my mentor and start interning for them.