August 2016
How to be a LEO and a LORE Jahir David Parra del Ángel
IFMSA - Mexico
nore.mexico@gmail.com
Here I am. I’m a 3rd year student in the Univesidad Veracruzana Campus Xalapa, and my name is David. I’m a Local Exchange Officer of my Local Committee: AMEXA, and the question you have is why am I writing about SCORE while being part of another Standing Committee? This is the story, it will be long but I’ll start. I joined the federation when I was a 1st year student and I joined DSP (Supportive Project Division for the acronym in Spanish) and then SCOPH but in the last year I became interested in International Exchanges, especially in SCOPE. In November last year I’ve been elected as a LEO, in that time I didn’t even know that SCORE exists, actually I was surprised when I noticed that SCORE exists and I started to have plans and projects with them. But there was a problem. We didn’t have a LORE, and as the second elections passed, SCORE was going to be closed in my Local Committee. So my LC president, the NORE, the LONE (Local Officer of National Exchange) of my LC and I decided to absorb the SCORE functions. I’ll act as LORE assistant until we find a permanent LORE.
In my case I had the advantage that I already knew how to use the database of SCORE (similar to the SCOPE one), and I started to get involved in SCORE. To tell you the truth I didn’t expect much about the job, for me it was like “SCOPE number 2”, but now I know that
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I was wrong. SCORE and SCOPE are similar but not the same, for me it was hard to come to SCORE and have the LEO mentality, a lot of things were different. Only the database looked familiar for me, the other things were so new and it was difficult to learn them. As a LEO I have 19 places for medical students and I add also 8 new places from SCORE, so in the year we could receive 28 students. To be honest I expected only about two SCORE places. I panicked. But now I realize that being a LEO and a LORE is not so different and I enjoy them both. The experience I have working with SCOPE and SCORE is hard, and to separate the work between them was not easy at all. But I realized that SCOPE and SCORE can work together to get better results and to improve. I’m planning “Training for New Contact Persons”, an idea I had for SCOPE but I involved SCORE as well and this training will happen in the next days. To finish my story, I would like to say that even if I’m a LEO working with SCORE team, it has been a great experience. Now I know that their work sometimes is underappreciated but they deserved credit. In my LC, we will have new SCOPE/SCORE projects. Now I realize that I’m not a sky blue blood or a dark blue blood, I’m just a Blueblood ;) .