Blog post #8: Overall Reflection

My goals were:

I want to learn more about the jewish culture.

I want to be able to use idioms currently.

Make sure this internship will be a positive experience.

Do my tasks efficiently. (with less possible errors haha, well no one is perfect.)

I want to speak with a decent accent in english.

I want to correctly learn how to pronounce the "th" sound. I guess that by hearing other people use it, I'll eventually learn how to do so.

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I did learn more about the jewish culture. I learned a lot more than I thought. Mostly about what they do at Christmas since they don't really have a Christmas tree etc.

I couldn't use idioms in my everyday life. Mostly because, I don't speak a lot with people around the hospital. I rarely speaks with my supervisor or anyone from my department. Also, that's hard to find an idiom to the right situation.

My internship has his bad and right sides. Overall, I think it's a great life experience and it was helpful.

When it comes to the tasks , I think that the best person to judge about this isn't me but my supervisor. Let's say that I'll see this later on my evaluation paper. Though, I did gave myself a nice auto-evaluation. I never had a real job or anything so it was a nice experience on this point too. I'm hoping to put this in my CV.

My accent definetly got better after every day over there at the hospital. I didn't get to speak as much as I want but I'm a good listener and I think that this helped a lot too.

Like I said in another blog post, I'm getting better at pronuncing the "th" sound. That was one of my main goal and I can almost do it.

Stategies: At first I wanted to use guesses. I really wonder why!! I never really used it. The main strategies that I used and that truly help me is repetition. When I encountered a new word, I made the person repeats it again. Sometimes two or three times. I also asked to spell it to note it down. Like I said, I gave up on guessing. That's not a good idea in this kind of environment. Because if your supervisor tells you to go to a certain place and that you did not understand, I don't think that guessing will help.

Language: I think that I have less difficulties to use verbs. It's just more easy to say it in a sentence without thinking about it. I also less difficulties with my accent but I guess that this doesn't really count in the language part.

Growth: I learned to be more self-confident about myself. I'm less shy to speak english or even to speaks with strangers. I'm not the kind to start a random conversation with someone in the elevator but when the other person starts talking to me, I'm more comfortable than before. I just answer then and joke around if they seems ok with it. Not only am i less shy to speak in person, but I got a little bit over my fear to speak on the phone. I always hated to speak on the phone but I recently had to make english phone calls. It's less stressing than I thought. Of course, I still do mistakes but it's not like the person is going to yell at me or anything so I don't bother anymore.

The internship: I learned more about the jewish community which was one of my goal. I'm glad about it because I hate being ignorant about a subject. It's the kind of situation that you tend to judge without really knowing them but they are very nice people. Other than that, If I had to do it again, I would probably change the environment. I like the place where I'm doing a stage but I don't like being in an hospital more than 2 hours. I'm a little bit scared of bacteria and all that stuff. Also, I wish I had done translation or something related to language. All I did was posting stuff around the hospital. 

Gratitude: I haven't finish my internship. My last day is next tuesday. I never thought about this but I'll probably thank her verbally and everyone else in the department. I'm going to thanks them for their warm welcome that they gave me.

The placement: This place is great if you are thinking about working in an office later on. You do a lot of office work and if you are comfortable with moving around the hospital and talking to patient, I recommend it. As for me, I didn't like doing office work since I was hoping to do translation.