Community Outreach Through Language
A significant part of my education has been based around community service. Being a multilingual modern language student, I have been able to use my capabilities to help members of the local hispanic community. These are the following endeavors I have participated in as a part of community outreach efforts:
Participated in a pilot program that introduced Spanish/English medical interpretation to Clemson University
The program enabled me to speak upon biological concepts in English and Spanish with fluency and confidence
Worked as a volunteer interpreter/translator for Clemson Rural Health Clinic through their VeggieRX program
VeggieRX is a program that aims to treat diabetes amongst food scarce members of the hispanic community through supplying packages of fresh produce and cookbooks on how to prepare them
I worked with 33 distinct non-english speaking hispanic patients through this program
My responsibilities varied from informing patients when to pick up their packages, inquiring about their satisfaction with the program, and discussing their symptoms as well as overall health outlook
After discussing the personalized health plan of each distinct patient, I also was tasked with phone call checkups to each patient every few weeks
Cultural skills were also exercised alongside linguistic skills
I was asked to provide insights on what types of recipes to place in the supplementary cookbooks to ensure they are culturally appropriate
Since the program was geared towards recently migrated hispanic patients, the organization wanted these recipes to reflect the customary dishes of their patients to increase the likelihood they would be consuming all of the required produce
I helped to create informational material for the South Carolina Cancer Alliance
Along side a classmate, I was able to create informational and promotional material for an event centered around cancer health outcomes for women in the hispanic community
Over the course of a few weeks, my classmate and I translated all of the necessary documents from english to spanish
Information of the documents pertained to cancer of the reproductive organs as well as the logistics of the event
I assisted in running a simulation based program at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville which taught fourth year medical students how to work with medical interpreters and non english speaking patients
Throughout the course of the program, I worked with teams of medical students and assessed how they performed during the simulation
I was tasked with assessing each student on factors such as cultural sensitivity, professionality, etiquette,etc.
At the end of the event, I gave an informative speech on the place of medical interpreters in the health care environment as well as how doctors can best utilize their talents to ensure high quality patient care
Other Notable Work
Outside of community service and utilization of language based skills, here is other notable work:
Participated in a summer long research internship at Weill Cornell Medical School of Graduate Sciences
The program revolved around testing the effectiveness of treating pyruvate kinase 1 deficiency based colorectal cancer with an anemia medication that targets the same deficiency
Over the course of several months I was tasked in performing necropsies on mice, processing harvested organs into lysates, and using them to run experiments such as western blot and enzyme kinetic assays
This experience fortified my skills in wet lab research, data analysis, critical thinking, scientific writing/communication, etc
Research on this topic is still underway and I will be working at the lab once more post graduation