High school seniors planning to pursue a career in medicine need to look no further than the Capital Region BOCES New Visions: Health Careers program.
Located at Ellis and St. Peter’s hospitals, the program prepares high school seniors for more than two-dozen careers and immerses them in a thought-provoking and challenging curriculum designed to build their knowledge of the human body and medicine.
“I definitely want to be in the medical field, and I chose New Visions for the experience, to be able to be around patients and in a hospital setting,” said Kimberly Gross, who attends the program from Scotia-Glenville High School.
“New Visions provides a more-focused education,” added classmate Maryam Ibrahim, of Schenectady. “New Visions is medically based, medically integrated.”
The New Visions: Health Careers program is a one-year program that turns area hospitals into classrooms for highly motivated, academically successful high school seniors. In the program, students learn through traditional methods (lecture, reading, research, writing and focused study), group discussions, internships and rotations.
Students also take part in approximately 30 rotations in the hospital in departments ranging from surgery to outpatient care and even facility operations. In the past, students have witnessed and taken part in everything from C-sections and hysterectomies to stroke patient care and emergency room operations.
“I am looking forward to the emergency department round and seeing and learning all I can,” said Andrew Altschule, who attends the program from Guilderland High School.
Altschule chose the program to prepare for a career as an anesthesiologist.
“I want to help people handle their pain. New Visions is positioning me in the direction I want to go, and it is giving me much more experience than you would get just sitting in a classroom,” he said.
Ibrahim plans to be a trauma surgeon.
“I like pressure, and I work better under pressure. I also like to fix things and I take pleasure when things I have worked on work again,” she said.
An aspiring physician’s assistant, Gross said she loves the New Visions program.
“This education is so much more centralized around what I want to do in the future, and I find I learn a lot more in this setting,” she said.
Visit the New Visions: Health Careers – Capital Region BOCES page for information on the program.