Culture

I’m starting to really love my placement and everything it entails. For starters, I’m becoming more comfortable with my coworkers and I’m feeling more comfortable making jokes with both my coworkers and the people who I interact with in the community. The culture around the office is very similar to that of a family where Zach is like the dad who tells everyone what to do but is simultaneously the butt of 90% of the jokes we make which makes working so much more fun.

We also attend a lot of meetings with our boss and something that I’ve noticed is that Zach and I are often among the only men at our meetings which is also an interesting experience. Another common theme I’ve noticed in many of these meetings is how everyone appears to be reasonably united on what needs to be done in order to solve whatever task is at hand and while that is great for moving the discussion along I sometimes wonder whether trying to engage people who might otherwise not be interested in issues such as public health would be worth exploring. Although it might be riskier I think it opens up the possibility of more widespread change because in my opinion talking with likeminded people is easy but talking with those with views very different to your own is obviously more difficult, yet is ultimately more productive.