Over the course of 10 days, Josh Adamczak, a 2017 Tomah High School graduate, got to experience what it would be like to attend medical school.

Adamczak was part of the National Youth Leadership Forum in Advanced Medicine & Health Care at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

It was a busy 10 days, Adamczak said, but worth it.

It was really a really cool experience, but also kind of like intense, he said. It was non-stop from eight in the morning until about 10 at night, every night for 10 days. I got the schedule beforehand, and I realized it was a packed schedule, but I didnt really realize how in-depth or how much we would really be doing.

The program, which ran from July 2-11, is for students seriously considering a career in the medical field. They got to visit a medical training facility, take part in a simulated patient encounter, created a public awareness campaign and a social media campaign centered around a current topic in public health.

Participants got to attend lectures and speaking events, apprentice doctor workshops, real-life simulations and virtual reality surgery. They also went behind the scenes at medical institutions to interact with university faculty and professionals in the medical field.

It was like being enrolled in a mini medical school, Adamczak said. Participants received a considerable amount of information and learned a lot from a variety of sources.

We had lectures often about a variety of topics. We learned suturing, we did a thing about orthopedic surgery, he said. We did a virtual reality surgery, and we visited the shock-trauma center in Baltimore, which is like one of the biggest and most widely used. We visited the medical school in Marylands School of Medicine just tons of things.

The most memorable activity, Adamczak said, was a simulated patient encounter in which the patients are professional actors and actresses.

Its like a routine doctor visit, and you have so many questions and stuff that you have to ask, he said. Its one of the tests to become board certified like if you dont wash your hands youll fail, but with us they made it where it was a case study. (It) was really cool, because ... theyre trained to help teach med students. Then we used it in our groups to try to figure out, to diagnose what they had.

The experience that left the biggest impression on Adamczak was a lecture about medical ethics.

We spent like an entire afternoon talking about ethics, and I thought it was really interesting because we basically got different scenarios, and we had to argue our point of why, he said.

I found it really interesting because with medical ethics, if a patient has the decision-making capabilities, they can refuse whatever treatment they want and you can do nothing about it.

The lecture made Adamczak, who first became interested in a medical career after taking anatomy in high school, think about changing his career path.

I went to this camp, kind of hesitant if I really wanted to do medicine or not. But before I really wanted to do it, then I started to kind of doubt it, like, do I really want to do medicine? Do I really understand what it is that I would be doing? he said. This actually made me think more toward medical law, because we did a thing on ethics, it was really interesting. So Im thinking about possibly pursuing that instead.

Overall, it was a fun trip, Adamczak said, especially meeting new people.

The best parts was, other than just getting to be able to do all of those things that a majority of kids my age dont get to do, is that I made amazing friends from across the nation, he said. I had a group of probably like five friends that were in my group, and we were inseparable doing all this stuff together. ... I now have friends all over the place.

Starting this fall, Adamczak will attend Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he will major in bio-chemistry.

Continue reading here:

Prestigious medical school hosts Tomah High School grad - La Crosse Tribune