By Claire Walinga

Over the past few years Windom Area High School has been introducing and offering classes in a number of career pathways, Health Science is one of those pathways. Through three different course offerings, our health science pathway offers many different hands-on opportunities such as job shadowing and in class lab experiences as well as having guest speakers. Taken together, the embedded experiences make up some of our student’s favorite high school experiences.

Intro to Medical Careers is a career and technical education class. The class introduces students to a variety of different healthcare careers, some of which certification can be achieved in as little as two years. One of the components of Intro to Medical Careers is job shadowing and guest speakers. Due to COVID-19, job shadowing and guest speakers did not happen this year. Jim Axford teaches the class and he stated, “the hospital and clinic have strict guidelines due to COVID and unfortunately having students in their facilities was just not possible.” Allie Ward took the class last year and said, “being able to meet with a group of people that worked within the medical field and to hear their side of things provided good real world experiences.” Emily Masters is the Chief Humans Relations Officer at Windom Area Health. When a student comes to job shadow she helps to make sure the student has all of their immunizations and knows and understands the specific policies the hospital has. Emily also stated job shadowing is really good in helping students decide if that field is right for them or not. In fact she explained, “for example, we had a student come shadow that wanted to work in surgery. When job shadowing during a procedure, the student fainted. It was a good eye opener that maybe surgery isn’t the right path for them.”

The Health Science pathway at Windom Area High School has evolved quite a bit since it first started. At first, Intro to Medical Careers was the only class, now there are some new classes that have been introduced. Medical Terminology and Emergency Medical Responder are the two classes that were just introduced this year. A prerequisite for many medical related career paths, Medical Terminology helps students understand the Greek and Latin based language of medicine and medical terms. This class also emphasizes on the abbreviations, symbols, and terms associated with the movements of the body. Emergency Medical Responder is a class that teaches students life-saving methods for critical patients. The class was recently working on the initial patient assessment, which includes gathering as much information as possible on a patient.

Having fun in a class is essential to staying awake, according to Jadyn Wormstadt the class was very fun. Her favorite part of the class was the hands on learning, she loved being able to learn how to take blood pressure, suture, and staple. As for Jim Axford he explained. “My favorite part of the class is getting to know the students and providing them insight into the many different careers there are in healthcare.  Students are able to understand what goes into a variety of careers and then can determine if it would be a good path for them or not.”

Intro to Medical Careers is a very interesting and fun class. This class offers real life experiences through job shadowing and has led to some new classes. The medical field is always growing. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 22,239 students entered medical school in 2020. Albert Schweitzer said, “success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Intro to Medical Careers, Medical Terminology, and Emergency Medical Responder are all classes that can lead to a students happiness and success.