In an auditorium in the Eppley Science Hall, high school students are sitting side-by-side with UNMC graduate, nursing, pharmacy and medical students. They’re sharing lunch and listening as, one after the other, graduate students stand up to discuss their academic path — for this presentation, the path that led them to research.
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UNMC students and High School Alliance members listen to presentations at the University of Nebraska Interprofessional Society’s research Lunch and Learn. |
The meeting is part of the High School Alliance Lunch and Learn series, a new initiative by a newly founded student group, the University of Nebraska Interprofessional Society.
Duy Ha, past president of the Graduate Student Association and an M.D./Ph.D. scholar in Cellular & Integrative Physiology and Surgery, said that with the strong support of the UNMC Student Senate, this new group is trying to create a novel mentoring experience for high school students that emphasizes collegiality and interdisciplinary efforts on campus.
“We really want the students to be exposed to all types of professions that are related to health care,” Ha said. “They will be practicing and going into these fields as a team to care for patients, so it’s not just your own specific career paths.”
Ha’s own mentee, he said, was interested in anesthesiology, but had no idea there were nurse anesthesists as well as physician anesthesiologists.
“So she hadn’t really considered the nursing field,” Ha said.
But today’s focus is on research, and the students listen as Ha and other speakers describe how they fell in love with the investigative side of health care.
“It’s not something a high school student might think is very closely related to health care, but it underlies a lot of things,” Ha said. “So we want them to keep an open mind and go explore some research experiences if they have the opportunity.”
Messan Ametitovi, a College of Public Health student, said he has mentored children before and enjoys being part of the new program.
“Growing up, one of the toughest decisions I made was what I wanted to be or do,” he said. (After getting an undergraduate degree in Health Care Management and a master’s in Public Health, he is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in Infectious Disease Epidemiology.)
Emma Frerichs, a High School Alliance student who attends Millard West, is partnered with mentor Michael Price. She came to UNMC planning to pursue a career in clinical health care, but she enjoyed the research presentation.
“I’ve learned a lot of new things, and things I wasn’t expecting,” she said. “This shows how many different opportunities and jobs there are. I’m really open to everything.”
Price, an M.D./Ph.D. scholar in Cellular & Integrative Physiology, said that he is hoping to pay forward the mentoring he received as a young student.
“I received a lot of good mentorship, and I felt like that was really crucial to shaping my ideas and interests, and even my motivation toward research,” he said.
Price thought the research presentation was strong and may have swayed some students to consider the academic track.
“Today’s discussion introduced the idea of research to a lot of these students who really didn’t know what that means,” he said. “When I was in high school, the idea of research was, you go look things up in a book or on the Internet and then you go write a paper.”
The aspect of a research career is much more exciting, he said.
“You’re discovering things — vs. proving — discovering new ideas, or discovering new mechanisms of the way the world works. I think it’s important for students to understand that you’re not just reading information in a book — that information had to come from somewhere. Where did all these health care guidelines or ideas about treatment come from? From research.”
Ha hopes to expand the mentorship program to other University of Nebraska campuses, and in fact the group is already meeting with professors in the pre-health fields at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“This is a great time for these partnerships to be established, and, in the long term, it would be nice to connect it from the high school to the undergrad to the UNMC levels,” he said. “This could be great for recruitment. We’re working with UNO first, but we would like to get the schools here at UNMC on board to provide support so we can hold these activities.”