Children and teenagers can try on a future in medicine at a workshop at Bloomington’s WonderLab museum this Saturday. A variety of medical professionals will be on hand to show participants how their jobs work.
Organizers say it does not hurt to start young when encouraging the next generation to consider a career in medicine. On Saturday they hope to inspire participants with displays and hands-on activities that run the gamut of medical fields. Students will have the chance to talk to specialists in subjects from bariatric surgery to urology.
WonderLab’s Staci Radford-Vincent says some students will examine pigs’ hearts – a potentially stomach-turning task.
“Once they get over and they realize how interesting it is, and they’re being shown it in a way not to gross them out,” she says. “They’re being showing this heart in a way that it is an interesting thing, there’s things they can learn from it, the similarities to the human heart, then they get really interested and they get really engaged, and they start touching it.”
Organizers say they want children to learn that medical careers are challenging but also fun. IU Health pharmacist Dr. Raja Hanania will focus on diabetes care when he meets with students.
“I want to show them basically things that we do on a daily basis with diabetic patients who may need insulin, let’s say, or may need pills,” he says. “I will also emphasize the importance of diet and exercise to them.”
Radford-Vincent says the next step is to make sure children receive the math and science education they need to make a career in medicine possible.