At Lynnfield High School (LHS), a group of students is paving the way for future medical professionals by launching a club dedicated to exploring careers in healthcare.
The Health Occupation Students of America (HOSA) club was founded by juniors Celisha Diaz, Jerusha Robins, Grace Peña, and Chloe Cieslewicz, along with sophomores Jason Tran and Jad Tannous, who saw a gap in opportunities for aspiring medical students at (LHS).
“We were talking one day and realized there weren’t really any opportunities for high schoolers who wanted to pursue healthcare as a future career,” Cieslewicz said. “There wasn’t really any way for us to kind of learn about that. So we did a little bit of research, and Celisha found this program called HOSA.”
With around 200,000 members, HOSA boasts chapters worldwide, organizing divisional competitions where teams solve health-related scenarios and receive scores from a panel of judges. Winning chapters advance to national competitions.
However, the LHS healthcare club has not yet focused on HOSA events, as they are not official, paying members of the organization. Instead, all the
events have been independently organized by the student founders, with some outside help from the town.
“Everything we’ve done so far has just been independent, and it’s amazing because of the connections through the town,” Dr. Zachary Billings said, a biology teacher at LHS who is the club supervisor. “We’ve got another half dozen connections that we’re going to do for orthodontics and orthopedic surgery and other events coming up that I don’t have firm dates for yet.”
This year, the club has hosted events featuring highly knowledgeable professionals through these connections. One key collaboration has been with Lynnfield resident Romeo Catracchia, the CEO of AutonomUS, Inc., a medical technology company in Cambridge.
With the many industry contacts he has made while working closely with institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Catracchia offered to assist early on in the process of establishing a healthcare-focused club at LHS in any way he could.
“He’s helped us get into contact with doctors and medical device sales companies to do presentations with us, which has been really, really helpful since, obviously not all of us have resources to kind of reach out to these companies,” Cieslewicz said.
Soon enough, LHS HOSA members were learning about the medical field directly from professionals, One event featured Dr. Anthony Samir, a diagnostic and interventional radiologist at Mass General Hospital, who joined via video call to discuss his profession and answer students’ questions about his career.
At that event, Catracchia — whom the HOSA members call him Mr. C. — visited the school to demonstrate the Butterfly Ultrasound, a handheld, phone plug-in ultrasound device that allows doctors like Dr. Samir to perform diagnostic tests anywhere in the world.
These hands-on experiences, where students gain access to equipment and learn how it works, make the HOSA club crucial for those interested in a career in medicine.
“I just love learning more about biology,” Robins said. “The more I learn about biology and I learn about humans and how our systems are working, the more it really interests me.”
Unsurprisingly, the HOSA founders developed an interest in medicine through personal experiences that inspired them to help others through science. Many also grew up with family members who are in the field.
“My dad’s a doctor and my mom’s a nurse, and my parents have had a lot of influence on me,” Tannous said. “I’ve always wanted to help people and ever since I’ve seen my dad helping people, I’ve wanted to kind of follow in his footsteps.”
Similar stories can be heard from each of the six founding members: Diaz has an aunt who is a nurse. Cieslewicz’s mother is a neonatal surgeon, and her father works in the biotech industry. Tran has an uncle in Australia who is a pediatrician. Robins’ inspiration, however, comes from a more traumatic experience — when her aunt’s fingers were severed this winter.
“She didn’t get the medical attention that she needed. They should have been able to put them back, but they weren’t, because she didn’t have a doctor at the time,” she said. “You can see the need that there is, and it just motivates me to want to go into that field.”
Thanks to their efforts, LHS has a way for students with similar passions to take their first steps toward a medical career, where they will eventually have the opportunity to save lives every day.
Already, the impact of their work is evident. Dr. Billings said he regularly counts more than 30 attendees at HOSA meetings.
“My mom came in one day to do a presentation, and a couple of weeks later, there’s this girl that I sit next to in history, and she has a twin sister in my grade, and her sister told me that she came home and said ‘I want to do exactly what Chloe’s mom is doing when I grow up.’” Cieslewicz said. “I told my mom, “You inspired one. If you think you didn’t inspire at least one person there, well, you did.’ And I thought that was really meaningful.”
