Friday, August 2, 2013

Presentation Complete!

Today I achieved a goal of mine this summer and I have to say it feels really good, as achieving goals should feel like. A few weeks ago my manager told me that I was to prepare an article “that we would all find interesting” of my choosing to present to the entire team. Naturally I thought, what can I share with these people who work in the pharma/health care world, that they don’t already know??! With minimal direction and vague instructions, I kind of felt a little lost, so I just started reading databases. I’ve never sifted through online databases for pleasure before so that was a new experience, but after a few hours I started to find some articles that appealed to me on insulin pumps. After extensive work on this article, I chucked it, deciding it was not pertinent to Novo as they specialize in injection therapy. Going out of my comfort zone, I decided instead to talk about education with youth with type 2 diabetes—something I know zippo about. However, I figured I might as well take on a challenge and learn something new in the process. As I got more into the topic, I decided to compare and contrast it to education with youth with type 1—something I am familiar with. I thought it would be interesting for the team to think about type 2 diabetes in a younger population as it is common to think of type 1 for children and type 2 for adults. I know that is what I thought all along growing up. I mean it really is sad that youth are living with type 2 diabetes and we need to think about this more as a society. Obesity becoming declared as a disease?? What is going wrong with our world. Anyway, so my manager had been kind of scaring me for a few weeks about doing a good job on this and not putting much on the slides and having animations and not looking at notes, so naturally I was becoming nervous. But, every time you get up and public speak, it is a learning experience—I don’t do it much at school so I know I have a lot to learn. But when I was up there, after getting my nerves out at first, I became increasingly confident in what I was saying, and even felt like I didn’t need my notecards. The best part was that I think that everyone enjoyed the topic—I urged them to think of the younger population too when you think of type 2 diabetes and I saw a lot of heads nodding so that was reassuring. They pumped me with questions, but I responded without much hesitation or just simply said I don’t know that fact and would look it up, no shame there. Basically I guess that I feel good after presenting, and I’m glad it wasn’t a disaster. If only I could get my stomach to settle and my blood sugar to stay flat before presentations, I would feel a lot better prior!