On Tuesday, Oct.7, a group of  students attended the Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival.

The Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival is a program that offers high school students in in southeastern Minnesota the opportunity to learn more about medical careers and to narrow down the field they would like to work with in future.

Alex Arnold, Cora Arnold, Haozhang (Michael) Deng, Mooyoung Jung, Kyle Kerrigan, Jin Kyu (Jin) Kim, Byungsub (Michael) Kim, Calli Marg, Bryanna Meier, Maura Michener, Seoyoun (Albert) Oh, Yeonguk (Shin) Shin and Morgan Whyte were selected to attend.

It was a day of learning, sharing and creating career awareness through education, information on career fields and opportunities to use patient care equipment. Interested students are required to be approved and get registered  with the help of school counselor for this event and attendance is limited.

“We walked around a gym that had a lot of different stations about different fields to go into in medicine. And we also went to two classes on a specific class. I think the most interesting part was talking to the people in the therapy section,” said senior Maura Michener

According to Mr. Stevenson, who took the students to Mayo, the purpose for the activity was to let our students, particularly 11th and 12th graders, get introduced to lots of the health professions, and health career choices available at mayo clinics and other places, and know what sorts of job it is in medical field.

Albert Oh, one of the students went to the festival, said, “We basically walked around each different booth. It was like the career festival that we had when we were sophomore. We could try some of the machines or operations that people brought to there. I really liked everything. If I had to choose one aspect, I liked when they actually listened to our questions and answered as much and as best as they could. They were all so nice.”

There were lots of booths, and the workers told students what a specific career is going to be like.

“The idea is to give those who want to go to medical field of chance to narrow it down, and find out more about some of the jobs,” Mr. Stevenson said. The students listed their interests in about twenty areas online for registration, and the specialties assign students with different classes base on the interests. Each class was about 45 minutes long. Other time students were given time to walk around booth.

”There were nearly 50 booths of different categories at the Sport Center. Those booths are for different programmes. We saw lots of advanced medical equipments and some new technologies. And we could try off actual equipment by ourselves which was lots of fun, for example, we could experience doing operation like doctors. There were also some games. And We had lessons in groups of ten to twenty people,” Michael Deng, a junior, said.

Mike Kim, a senior, tried several pieces of medical equipment and listened to their explanation about each field. “Between those times, we had the time table that can make us to listen the lecture such as echo-cardiologist, audiologist, and radiologist. It was fun actually. The most interesting part was that I could experience the real medical equipment like surgical robotic arms. It was really cool,” he said.

Mr. Stevenson thought the program went pretty well. Mayo Clinic has been doing it a few years now and has fine tuned their presentation. . He really hopes more students will attend next year.