Emily Shen ’18: Harvard Medical School MEDscience
For this past week, I was an intern for Week 7 of the Harvard Medical School MEDscience Summer Program, which offers a total of nine sessions of week-long summer medical intensives for high school students. Thirteen students passionate about science, medicine, and health care come together from all over the country and even Canada to take advantage of the unique opportunities MEDscience offers. In general, there are very few medical programs in the country geared towards high school students, whether it be because of age and education level, laws and hospital policy, or costs. Most of the medicine-related summer programs you can find for high school students are those in which you’d sit in a classroom all day and learn what you could have learned by just searching around the internet or reading textbooks. And if you’re lucky, you’ll maybe find a program that offers some lab time or hands-on activities through dissections, experiments, or skills labs such as taking vitals or suturing. But those programs are very costly and lab and skill time is very limited. MEDscience, however, not only is a place where most of your time is spent either in skills labs or in real-life simulations, but they also want this opportunity to be available for as many students as possible and offer as many scholarships as they can for those who need them.
One of the reasons MEDscience is unique is because of their technology. “STAN” is an adult mannequin that helps students utilize mock medical cases in their learning. STAN has pulses, a blood pressure, heart tones, breath sounds, and bowel sounds; and through an audio system, instructors can speak as STAN, communicating directly with the students, answering their questions as the patient. These aspects of STAN allow students to practice taking vitals, like heart and respiratory rate, and information such as medical history just as they would if confronted with a human patient. Through the computer system, STAN’s condition can change quickly in response to a progression of an illness or to students’ actions in response to a condition, like giving oxygen, medications, etc.
Another aspect of MEDscience that struck me was the people, the staff and guest speakers. Firstly, everyone part of MEDscience, whether it be a year-round instructor or a one-time speaker, has a passion for what they do. Each individual has their own specific field in which they are interested ranging from nursing to pediatrics to marine biology, yet everyone had the shared goal of wanting to teach and inspire the next generation of scientists to find their own passions. The instructors who work with high school kids everyday are not only knowledgeable about the material they teach, but also know how to teach it in a way that will be engaging, stimulating, and impactful for teenagers. The speakers and guest lecturers that came in were happy to share their work, research, and advice with students. I had the opportunity to also sit in on these lectures and presentations along with the students and the piece of advice almost everyone gave was to find opportunities early on that allow you to explore many different areas of study so you can find those passions.
In addition to daily lectures from the instructors, the students also learn how to apply that knowledge in their medical simulations with STAN and through their skills-based labs. In these five short days, students learn far too many skills for me to list at once. On the first day, they learned how to take the five vitals which are heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, temperature, and oxygen saturation by first practicing on each other and then practicing through a real-life medical situation on STAN. On the second day, they learned how to intubate someone, apply a tourniquet, insert an interosseous (IO), handle trauma cases, and stabilize spine/neck injuries. Wednesday was our CPR day in which they all spent the morning becoming CPR certified and the afternoon learning how to insert an intravenous (IV). On Thursday, they learned how to suture and also had the incredible opportunity to do a simulation on a pediatric mannequin at Boston Children’s Hospital. We wrapped up our week with more simulation cases on Friday and celebrated the completion of the program with a certificate ceremony.
Besides offering the summer medical intensives, HMS MEDscience also offers a semester-long program. MEDscience provides a different method of teaching for the students who participate through connecting their lectures and classes to engaging activities, hands-on simulations, and real-world problems. The program was originally created in 2008 to address the achievement, opportunity, and inspiration gap in the Boston Public Schools and has now spread to other public and private schools in Massachusetts, including Rivers. Students learn the normal organ system-based material in their regular classes at school and then spend 75 minutes a week for sixteen weeks at the HMS MEDscience lab participating in simulations and learning the same lab skills taught in the summer program.
As an intern, one aspect of my job was helping make sure the program would run smoothly, whether that be preparing materials ahead of time or making sure all the students were ready to go in the morning. Another aspect of my internship was helping out during the skills labs. If a student couldn’t quite get their IV in the right place or was confused about suturing, I would be available as a resource for help. Lastly, every intern also has the opportunity to present a case to the students. This means I would research an illness or condition and present myself as the patient to the students. They would ask me questions, take vitals, run tests, and discuss possible diagnoses.
If you are interested in medicine and healthcare and think this program might be for you, you can find out more about their summer program here. Or you can participate in their semester-long program by taking Anatomy and Physiology at Rivers. And feel free to ask me any questions about how I got involved or how you can get involved early on in the medical field.
