The Most Life Changing Experience Of My Life

At the end of the summer, the staff nominated a select group of outstanding students to the Springboard Scholars Program. The Springboard Scholars Program serves as an opportunity for alumni to stay connected with their peers, network with new people, and hone leadership skills. We asked the Scholars to write a short blog on how Summer Springboard has impacted their life.

Adilene Klink shares her personal experience below.

“Summer Springboard was one of the most life changing experiences of my life. Through this program, I gained insight into my future career in medicine. Not only did I gain valuable knowledge, but I also made friendships that will last a lifetime. Although I was reluctant at first, I quickly felt comfortable in the environment and could apply my social skills as well as gain new ones with the people around me. The experience Summer Springboard gave me would also help many people with their career decisions as well as the social aspect of it too.

At the program, we had many valuable opportunities such as participating in a simulation lab at the University of San Francisco.  We also did a simulation of a mass casualty incident. Both of these experiences gave us insight into how working with emergency medicine was like. We also got to go on a tour of UCSF and explore the different wards of the hospital. These experiences helped us understand the different areas in the hospital in which we may be interested in working in the future.

The friends I made at the program are people who I still talk to on a daily basis. The community at Summer Springboard was welcoming and the staff helped us feel comfortable from the beginning to the end. The bonding time and activities that Summer Springboard gave us helped us create a better working environment when learning. These bonding experiences helped us develop our social skills in which we can apply for our future careers.

Not only did Summer Springboard give us activities to learn about our peers, they also gave us activities in which we could learn about ourselves. During the program, we were given personality tests in order to identify our weaknesses and strengths in which we could use to our advantage in interviews. A quiz that they let us take identified me as a dominant personality type, a rare personality that only two percent of people are born with. These dominant people are natural born leaders with qualities that many other people are not born with. In a mock interview, I used the qualities that a naturally dominant person is born with to describe myself which helped me stand out. Eventually in a job interview after the program, I used this advantage of interview practice in a real interview. I was told that my interview was extremely impressive for my age and I had been accepted for the job I had applied for.

Summer Springboard was full of unlimited opportunities that I used to my advantage. I came back feeling like a new person and truly felt like I was not completely spooked about the idea of college. I had felt comfortable living without my mother and being responsible about going to classes. I would recommend Summer Springboard to anyone who wants to gain knowledge about college and gain skills to help them for the rest of their life.”