On Friday, Sept. 5th , the future healthcare workers of Four Corners Upper School (FCUS) took the opportunity to learn more about the medical field by attending one of two HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America) fieldtrips: OneBlood conference, or the POP (Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Pedorthotics) conference.
For students such as Freshman Skylar Wilson, field trips like these are an immersive experience as they wish to be part of the medical field themselves in the future.
“I want to be a neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeons work with the brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves in the human body, and help people with nerve issues,” Wilson said.
The conferences surpassed a lot of the students’ expectations and were in fact a very engaging experience. Freshman Ja’nyah Federick who attended the POP conference, expressed that she had doubts on whether it could be something she would enjoy, since she thought of the conference as a lecture.
“I thought it was going to be boring, but I also thought that I was going to learn something I possibly want to do in the future,” Frederick said.
Despite her expectations, Frederick was impressed with how much she learned as well as how hands-on this experience truly was.
“Learning the process of how they make it [prosthetics] and making it comfortable for the person that needs it. We got to touch them and see how the companies work,” Federick said.
Aside from being interesting, students found that the conferences offered valuable information, such as tactics like shadowing, that would help them be better workers in the future.
“I think it could be really helpful because there was a lot of people from the field, just different aspects of it. They provided different advice, a lot of them talked about what they did to go to their specific aspect of their field, and a lot of it can be applied to different professions in the medical field. One thing they talked about a lot was shadowing which can be done in pretty much every field in the medical industry. [Shadowing means] going to a medical office and asking to follow that person around as they go about. You can do that in pretty much most of the medical fields, not just prosthetics and orthopedics, that’s something they emphasized a lot,” Sophomore Kailey Brown said.
Wilson also explained that what she learned during the OneBlood conference could help her become a better neurosurgeon in the medical field.
“I think it gave me a lot of awareness dealing with how blood drives help save thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives each year and when working with the body during surgery blood transfusions are really important to keep the patient alive,” Wilson said.
The conferences allowed for the students to learn about portions of the medical
field (Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Pedorthotics, and Blood Drives) and why they are so important for everyone.
“I definitely think that the medical field is a lot more important than other people would think because as an outside perspective you just think ‘Oh these are little things’, but once you go more into it you realize how important it is and how much people really need it,” Brown stated.
