Kia ora, from Katikati!!

Kia ora!

My name is Jaimi, I am 27 years old, I have two children, and I currently live in the small town of Katikati. This year I am completing the Diploma in Health Science.

Writing a blog is completely foreign to me, and something I am looking forward to completing week by week.

After watching the first lecture slides on Stream, I thought to myself, I really had no idea what this paper entailed. It was a compulsory paper and so I didn't look further into it until day one. 

But what did I think communication was? Something along the lines of a text to hubby to bring home some cheese, and when he turned up with cheese and the right kind, Voila! successful communication. But then I thought how can we communicate to others outside of our own realm of friends and family? How do doctors, scientists, journalists and so on spark the interest of their readers? So I picked up my trusty New Zealand Listener. A magazine I try to walk past every week in the supermarket, but like this week in big black bold letters it questions "Why us?". Why us? Let's look into that a wee bit. Below in smaller writing it then questions why New Zealand has such a high cancer rate. Well now I want to know why, and also how much danger I am in living in this beautiful country of ours. And so, the magazine has effectively caught my attention from two words on the front cover. The fact that inside the magazine the first sentence states how an Auckland dietitian thought developing bowel cancer was a huge slap in the face sets in stone to me that this will be a very interesting read,

Learning to write in a way that will capture an audience or readers attention like that is a skill worth learning for many reasons beyond this paper. I think this will help me next year as I move from extramural to internal and start my social work degree. I decided to complete the diploma in Health Science as I was torn between two completely different degrees. The electives, and the compulsory Health studies papers I had to take confirmed the degree and direction I wanted to go in.

Communication will be vital to me as a social worker and I find as I meet new people I can be quiet and a little shy. I am hoping that with this science communication paper I will gain some confidence in communicating with new people from the beginning. My ambitions are to help people in the long run, and to have a helping hand in society. I want to show my children that hard work, perseverance, and helping others pays off with more than a pay check at the end of the week.