Local Rising High School Seniors Get Hands-on Approach to Medicine

News RSS

In the Clinical Learning and Simulation Skills (CLASS) Center at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), rising high school senior Elizabeth Lozano bent over her manikin, carefully performing her first intubation. When she straightened, second-year MD student and mentor Damani Mcintosh-Clarke complimented her technique with a “good job!”“I was the first to do it,” Lozano said proudly. “I did some research at home, [but] they showed us [here] first. It’s pretty cool.”
Lozano was one of more than a dozen seniors from Washington, D.C.-area public and charter high schools participating in the SMHS Office of Diversity and Inclusion DC Health and Academic Preparation Program (DC HAPP), which gives qualifying students the opportunity to explore a career path in medicine. Students must receive two recommendations from teachers or guidance counselors and demonstrate an interest in pursuing health care to be accepted into the program.
“I’ve always been interested in science and medicine. Since the start of third grade, I’ve wanted to be more than just a doctor; I want to be a surgeon,” said to Ezechinyere Njoku, a senior at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School. “I want to learn as much as much as possible about the medical field and the medical world because there are so many things you can do that I still don’t know myself. Everything in this program is learning.”
Njoku, like Lozano and fellow cohort member Djibril Fall, a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School, embraced the array of learning experiences DC HAPP offers: guest speakers, a community health project, college preparation seminars, lectures on career paths and health conditions, and hands-on training.
“I’m open to everything and trying to take as much as I can in of all the things we do,” Fall said, later adding that the hands-on approach “is the ...

Read More