Harvard Medical School Summer Program Comes to Lowell
The HMS MEDscience student participants pose in front of Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, MA.
Lowell – Last month, 18 high school students from Lowell and surrounding towns participated in a program that exposed them to real-life simulations in the medical field. The newly launched program was developed from a collaboration between Project LEARN, Inc. and the Harvard Medical School (HMS) MEDscience program.
“This experience confirmed that I want to go into medicine,” said Audrey Djatcha, a 12th grader at Lowell High School. Djatcha said being in the program and on the Harvard campus inspired her to want to get more exposure to what it takes to become an obstetrician/gynecologist.
Lowell High senior, Audrey Djatcha, intubates a patient in the HMS MEDscience’s Emergency Room simulation lab.
The MEDscience course, which gives participants first-hand experiences in simulated medical emergencies, is designed to help students navigate their futures in medicine and deepen their classroom knowledge through hands-on learning.
“I’m so glad to have brought this program to life for Lowell students,” said Mira Bookman, Project LEARN’s Program Director.
“The medical field is notoriously difficult to break into, unless you have insider connections,” said Bookman, “and for a lot of kids, that may not be possible. Making something like this accessible to our students feels really meaningful and is having a great impact on them.”
The five-day pilot program gave participants a combination of classroom and experiential learning. During the first two days, students were based at Project LEARN’s Youth Innovation Space where they learned about the instruments they would use during the medical simulations.
“HMS MEDscience is one of many innovative programs we’re hosting for students this summer,” said LZ Nunn, Project LEARN’s Executive Director. “We’re reaching over 400 students through IDEA Camp, HMS MEDscience, internships and more. Our goal is to bring fun, enriching programs to students, so they can explore and experience what their future career might look like.”
Nunn stressed that partnerships with organizations like Harvard Medical School really make these real-world experiences possible for students.
“This program is meant to inspire and prepare students who are interested in going into medicine,” said HMS MEDscience’s Executive Director, Julie Joyal, RN, M.Ed. Joyal co-founded the program with her partner, Dean Nancy Oriol, in 2008 when they observed that not enough students from the diverse, surrounding communities were exposed to what medical careers looked like from the inside.
“We hope that when students complete the program, they are able to think critically and use their problem solving skills in any kind of situation, whether it’s high-pressure or not,” said Joyal.
Melanie Mai, a 9th grade Science teacher at Lowell High, guided students through an intensive curriculum which helped students learn about the body’s systems and its functions, and prepared them to be in a real-life professional medical setting.
“It was amazing watching my students be involved in what they're doing and seeing them put together traditional classroom learning with hands-on experiences to participate in something totally new and different,” said Mai. “These students are getting an opportunity that makes them step out of their comfort zone and into their future.”
The fun really began on day three of the course, when the students were invited to the Harvard campus in Cambridge. There, they met with medical professionals and worked in their “Emergency Room,” a state-of-the-art simulation emergency room, where students are able to interact with, diagnose, and treat acutely ill patients.
The group poses with their simulation patient in HMS MEDscience’s Emergency Room simulation lab.
According to the HMS MEDscience website, 96% of their program’s participants reported an improved understanding of biology concepts after working on cases with the “Emergency Room” simulator.
A post-survey sent to the students yielded that, following their time at the Harvard lab, 86% of the participants said the program made an impact on their desire to pursue a career in STEM or healthcare.
Many of the students, like Emily Garcia, a junior at the Innovation Academy Charter School, used this experience to fully introduce herself into the medical field, “Medicine has always interested me, but having this experience made it more real, more achievable,” said Garcia. “Getting to interact with people in the field made it feel like being one of them is something I could strive for. It’s not so daunting, anymore.”
For more information about the Harvard Medical School MEDscience program, or to sign up for future initiatives, contact Mira Bookman at Project LEARN: mbookman@projectlearninc.org.