Inspiring Young Minds: Rescop and JINC Partner for an Educational Internship Experience
Every child in the Netherlands should have the same opportunity for a successful and fulfilling working life. However, the reality is different: children born in neighborhoods with significant socio-economic disadvantages start at a major disadvantage when entering the labor market. Through its projects, JINC fights against this inequality.
Last Friday, in collaboration with our partner JINC, we organized a short internship for the first-year students of Curio Prinsentuin van Cooth from Breda. We welcomed the students and explained our work at Rescop. Together with our office manager Romy, we explained what GMP is and why so much paperwork is involved in making medicines.
Quality can be easily explained with everyday examples. Take toothpaste, for instance: you use it every day and expect it not only to clean your teeth well but also to taste the same every time. Medicines also have to meet strict quality requirements, even stricter than those for toothpaste.
You can only prove the quality of a product by documenting everything properly. Preparing a medicine can be compared to following a recipe. If you don't follow the recipe when baking a cake, the cake will fail. If a medicine is not prepared correctly, it can have serious consequences.
During the short internship, we had the children fold paper airplanes and gave them the task of writing down step-by-step instructions on how they did it. They then passed their description to another student, who had to fold the airplane based on these instructions. This exercise taught the children how difficult it is to describe something accurately. Two smart students used YouTube to create a nice airplane and wrote down step-by-step instructions. Their description was so clear that the other students were able to replicate the airplane almost perfectly.
Afterwards, we discussed the results and flew the airplanes. I praised the two students for their smart approach but also pointed out that they could have kept the description simple by just referring to the YouTube video.
It was a fun morning, and it is always great to contribute to JINC's mission and teach the children about our work at Rescop.