Madam Secretary Saves the Day and Jordan gets a “Prahject”
Going a little off the books this week with the prompts because I work for the government so I don’t really have a big starting up story with the DPH or the governor’s office… but today I am happy to report that things have sped up a little with my intern responsibilities! Things honestly started off quite slow with the DPH and I was probably being given 2 hours of work over a three day period which was quite frustrating. However, I went last week to the Executive Office of Public Safety to meet with the connection who got me my internship and say thank you to her for all of her help and we really hit it off!
Her name is Undersecretary Queally and she is in charge of the entire branch of Safety and Security in MA. It was funny when I met her because I was expecting to talk about things like policies and my job so far so I was nervous, but she actually dove into discussions with me about greek life at Wake (she was a KD at Vandy) and really broke the ice. We eventually talked about more health policy related issues and what she did for her job and we found that many of my interests matched up with what she works with on a regular basis. She invited me to a few meetings that were really interesting and I am very excited to see where these experiences will take me.
First I got to go watch her testify for a bill backed by Governor Baker on the sentencing and mental health evaluations of child predators. I got to see how the court room works and hear from all of these different lawyers and people who had stakes in the bill and the entire thing got me really excited about law school and made me feel like I was a part of something important even though I was just there to observe and learn.
The next meeting was about a health campaign for how MA is going to tackle the recent legalization of marijuana with a driving sober campaign. This was really interesting because these important figures were asking me my perspective on the issue as a college student and I got to talk about how a student might perceive the message that they were trying to send to the college community of “new smokers”. The campaign will be out in late July before schools start up and I cant wait to see it and know that I was in the behind the scenes of the production.
Finally, I got to go to a nomination and selection committee for police officers who were nominated for “the Hanna award” which is a big honor in the MA police world. I was given cases to review and helped Undersecretary Queally to keep track of who was decided would receive which awards at the ceremony in the Fall (which I am sad to not be able to attend but that’s okay). This meeting didn’t really have anything to do with public health but it was an exciting evet that I was proud to be included in either way.
After these meetings, Undersecretary Queally offered me a research project that she was hoping to start up involving opioid overdoses and criminal record relations. Basically she wants to get research on how many people who overdose are in “the system” and how many times are they before they OD. She is trying to prove that we need to do more to help these people when they are in custody because when you release them and they return to their old habits that is when they are a danger to others and themselves. I think that it’s an important and and interesting topic and I am excited to be a part of this as well.
Reaching out to Undersecretary Queally has made my internship much more exciting even just in the past week. I think that with first year internships it is probably not uncommon to feel bored at a desk for a long part of the day, but this past week has taught me that really it is your own job to go out and find your own learning experiences, even once you have a job set in place. There are people who will coast through the summer and sit in their cubes and collect their pay checks and not really get the full grasp of what the job is all about and I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to learn as much about the city and government and the health field in general as I can while I am here for these 10 weeks and I am excited to see what else I can expose myself to as my time here progresses.
