John Kou, Baylor University
This content was created by an EHS intern to describe intern experiences. It has not been revised or edited to conform to agency standards. The findings and conclusions are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
SUPEH Intern, Summer 2015
Interning with SUPEH was an experience that took me on one incredible journey during the months of June, July, and August. During this time, I was able to take part in various activities and assignments that not only benefited my understanding and skills in environmental health, but also my ability to benefit the well-being and health of the public too.
For my program, I was assigned to CDC’s Division of Emergency and Environmental Health Services (EEHS) and was paired with Robert Blake as my supervisor. Rob is an amazing man who has dedicated his time to make sure I succeeded, laid out instructions very clearly, and even cared about and how I liked the internship. My assignment was to update a communication toolkit for drinking water advisories. By doing this, I made important edits to the booklet. I particularly looked at sections that could have important steps added, made note of organizational charts, and looked into strategies on how to apply this tool in an emergency setting. I made edits to the document in several rounds. The first involved my own edits. The second time involved me editing the booklet after it had been edited by Rob’s co-workers. In addition to that project, I had the opportunity to be given a second assignment which involved researching technology for controlling environmental odors. Despite the name, this project gave me insight to knowledge I had not learned before in environmental health and how controlling what’s considered a small nuisance can make a big impact on the breakdown of wastes.
My experience at the CDC also took me outside of the office as well. I had the rare opportunity to sit in on some critical conference calls. One of these calls involved a nitrate emergency that occurred when I first started. Rob and I also attended a local meeting about a county water pipeline break. Acting as an apprentice, I took notes with him and we listened in on the announcements and reports from the meeting, while making our conclusions on the problem afterwards. We have developed a very good relationship. With this, I even requested to see how I could contribute even after I graduate from the SUPEH program. Today, I am in the process of writing up an article on these incidents we have seen and how our progress on the drinking water advisory toolkit can affect the drinking water supply in the nation.
With the individual SUPEH program, my colleagues and I were given some rare and fantastic opportunities to explore the field of environmental health. First we got to shadow a Food and Drug Administration inspector at a meatpacking plant. We learned about the process of delivering meat from cows and witnessed the entire process up close. Later, we went to a county office and shadowed the environmental health department there. During our time, we were even able to assist the inspector we shadowed and point out any health code violations we had to search for. In the middle of July, I had the opportunity to take part in a vessel sanitation assignment with Captain Jarret Ames in Miami. This assignment was the most exciting and enjoyable of the three. I say this because I got to learn how to inspect a structure of massive size and how to strategically search for pathogens and infectious diseases in the water supply, which was related to my other internship project with Rob. The assignment taught me how to think in a different perspective and how to manage and plan on how to check and diagnose critical problems on a vessel with many passengers and where the stakes are high.
When arriving back from Miami, I saw a group of student missionaries return from Nicaragua feeling accomplished about their work. I knew I wasn’t in a foreign nation doing missions work, but I felt accomplished in a different way; I was providing for the safety and security of the American public. I mention this, because this is what I feel every day I walk out of the doors from the CDC office. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has given me amazing opportunities and the passion to continue my pursuit to of environmental health and medicine to serve, provide, and protect the needs of the public.