From March 11-13, three Haven students traveled to Hershey, Pa. to attend the annual HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America) State Leadership Conference (SLC). Haven’s chapter of HOSA is very new, having only been founded last year.
“We started the club last year because me and Rheya are really interested in healthcare, and we noticed that our school doesn’t have that many healthcare-related clubs, so we wanted to have some sort of initiative at our school that is healthcare-related,” HOSA co-president and conference attendee Lavanya Dixit said.
Junior Laney Suh, an active member of the club, assisted with fundraising for the trip. Though she didn’t attend the SLC, she helped with the club’s fundraising of over $600 this year.
“Fundraising really was just us posting bake sales once a month, collecting the money, getting all the help we could go find. GoFundMe, Venmo, anything,” Suh said.
The conference had over 2,400 attendees from schools all over Pennsylvania. Junior and HOSA co-president Rheya Singh worked with Dixit to register Haven’s chapter to compete and take advantage of the available opportunities.
“[My goal in coming to the conference was] just to learn more about healthcare experiences, and get exposure,” Singh said.
The conference centers around students taking part in healthcare-related tests or participating in healthcare and leadership activities. Junior Amelie Gregory took the biomedical technician test.
“I thought that was really fun, because I even got to see real lungs inflated and deflated. I thought that experience overall was really cool,” Gregory said.
While at the conference, students had the opportunity to connect their interest in health studies with real world experiences and opportunities. The conference also gave time for students to talk to colleges about healthcare and STEM programs.
“After your event, you got to go around to a bunch of different tables and see a bunch of different colleges and see what they had to offer, or different programs and what they had to offer,” Gregory said.
The conference was also an opportunity for HOSA members to connect with other students interested in careers in healthcare.
“I thought it was a really good way to network and socialize with other people that share the same interests as you,” Gregory said.
In the end, getting to interact with other future healthcare workers alongside professionals led to students expanding what they thought was possible about the healthcare field.
“I think we learned just how diverse the healthcare field is because a lot of times healthcare can feel like it’s just one thing — you’re wearing a lab coat, or you’re a doctor,” Dixit said. “But they had a lot of vendors there who were showing us different colleges, and we also had some networking time, and we got to see so many different intersections of healthcare.”
