Project Blog #7

With tomorrow being the last day of my project, I feel I have grown from beginning to end. First, I have developed a better sense of the world of sports medicine from the perspective of a doctor. I have always been used to being a patient with the many injuries I have suffered from sports, but now it is the opposite. This exposure is a good start to the long road I am about to go down to becoming a doctor. Another way I feel I have grown is through my personality. I mentioned in an earlier blog that this experience is out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. I am interacting with patients and learning about them, as well as other doctors, which requires good social skills. When I am in unfamiliar spaces, I tend to be on the quieter side. While I am a shadow listening to the conversations between Dr. Schroeder and her patients much of the time, other times I need to be extroverted and friendly. To put it another way, I have been able to grow from more introverted to more extroverted and balance it. 

Finally, another thing I have been able to learn is time management. I get to clinic at 8 am and, depending on the day, leave around noon or 5 pm. The 8-5 days are a lot longer than I am used to, so I have learned and grown to manage my day around the hours. I have also been able to learn the difficulty of keeping a schedule on track with all of the patients she sees and how one thing, like the number of rooms or if a person needs injections, can throw it all off. 

Dr. Schroeder's clinic schedule, which I still haven't memorized even after a couple of weeks!

This experience has been a really good way to see what being in sports medicine was like, and allowed me to grow personally, so with that, thank you to everyone who helped with this project!