Orientation

I arrived in Dixon, IL for orientation for my summer program. After sitting through about two hours of hospital orientation videos (although they did provide chocolate chip cookies during the showing), we were given a brief tour of the hospital. The hospital is a 90 bed facility that seems to do pretty well for itself, about 5,000,000 in revenue a year, It looks like they will have us working on some community service project (details to be discussed in the next couple days) while rotating through different departments, including Medicine, Social Work, Physical Therapy, Pharmacy, and Public Health. So while I probably won't be getting the hands-on clinical experience one might hope for, I hope to get a pretty good idea of different departments and how they function within the scope of patient care.

My fellow interns include a couple of nursing students, a undergraduate biology major, and a recent Masters of Social Work graduate. A couple of them are locals to the area and all of us, at this point, don't really know what to expect.

The hospital itself sits on the Rock River. The tourist attractions that I've come across so far include Ronald Reagan's home, the yearly Petunia Festival (can it get any more rural sounding that that?), and that arch you see above.

The nice thing is that I can go home on the weekends, but I hope, once I get my camera which I left back home, to stick around, explore a bit, and maybe snap a few photos as I get a better feel for the town. If nothing else, I can do a better job of this than I did in the U-C and so maybe I won't be as eager to leave as I was this past school year.