Robin S. Sharma gave a definition of leadership that resonates with me, “Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence and inspiration. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire team-mates and customers.” When I was interning with Southwest Utah Public Health Department (hereafter referred to as SWUPHD), I had to complete an independent project under the supervision of my supervisor. This experience more than anything during my internship developed my leadership skills and gave me insight on leadership and what it is supposed to look, sound and feel like.

My independent project with SWUPHD was to lead a TopStar training. TopStar is a program that aims to Teach Obesity Prevention in preschool and childcare settings. I chose to lead this effort because I am personally very interested in what we can do to try and improve the obesity epidemic we are seeing in our society. I started working on this project in November of 2017 and continued to work on it until I ended my internship in May 2018. In these six months, I was able to get fully trained and certified to lead a TopStar course, recruited facilities and completed the training with three facilities in Iron County. The facilities had to do self-assessments, create action plans, attend all trainings and then do a final follow-up assessment. I was the leader involved in all steps of the facilities’ process. I had to be consistent, communicate clearly, be present and be willing to listen in order to be a good leader. There was multiple times in which things didn’t go as planned or plans changed, and as the leader, it was my job to stay both flexible and positive.  I developed leadership skills such as: leading presentations, organizing events and making multiple peoples’ schedules work together.

After having this leadership opportunity, I realized that to lead something to the best of your ability, you need to have passion behind what you are leading. Without passion, leading an effort is going to take a lot of energy that you won’t likely be willing to use. Without passion, when things go wrong, you might be more willing to give up. I am very passionate about improving public health and so this leadership opportunity was something I was committed to.  I was able to influence and inspire the childcare facilities that I worked with to make improvements to their menus and feeding habits. I also was able to inspire the employees at these facilities to care a little more about their personal health. Overall, this experience was so rewarding, and I know that I was able to show how passionate I am about spreading education that public health efforts. I look forward to leading public health efforts that will help society move towards a better and healthier tomorrow.

Because of this internship, I feel that I have experience that will give me an advantage as I continue to pursue a career in public health. Three hundred hours later, I know I want to work in public health and I look forward to my future career. I was encouraged and inspired by the employees at Southwest Utah Public Health Department as they showed me what helping your community by promoting health and the prevention of disease looks like. This internship gave me a great understanding of the daily tasks and challenges of a local health department as well as what it might look like to work in the different departments of public health. I enjoyed learning about each of the departments including: leadership, environmental health, health promotions, emergency preparedness, nursing and epidemiology. Overall, I feel that I performed well as an intern, but I may have made three hundred hours of intern work last longer than any other intern has. I had never experienced working on my own time schedule before this internship, and so I am grateful that those who worked with me throughout this process were willing to be patient with me while I learned what it’s like to work an unstructured, work schedule.

During this internship, the biggest takeaways came from my independent project. I am proud to say that I was able to award two child care facilities, Cox’s Child Care and Daddies Daycare, with Top Star Endorsements; these two were the first facilities endorsed in Iron County. I also presented the Top Star program to another facility, Learning Ladder, which means they are now one step away from being the third Top Star endorsed, child care facility in Iron County. Promoting, organizing and training these child care facilities on the Top Star program was so rewarding. The Top Star program as a whole promotes something I want to continue to be a lifelong advocate for: Teaching Obesity Prevention. Gaining experience with such a wonderful program has had an immeasurable impact on not only my professional experience in public health, but also my experience in helping others by promoting lifelong health.

This EDGE project was invaluable, but I do feel like my project ended up being a little intense. In the future, I will use smaller projects to move towards big goals, or bigger projects, so that they are more manageable and less daunting. Certain parts of the reporting process of this internship are easier because I have so much to report, but mostly, reporting on this project is difficult because I have so much to explain and report on. This project gave me ample leadership and presentation skills as well as it has shown me that I am capable of completing big tasks and meeting requirements.