Professional Service Learning

To fulfill this semester’s professional service-learning requirement, I decided to tap an

institution close to my heart and home (quite literally) that I’ve had a relationship with for years.
I’ve lived in Northeastern Pennsylvania since the age of twelve and the only medical school in
our area is Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine (GCSOM) in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The school founded an out-of-school program in 2010 called the Regional Education Academy
for Careers in Health – Higher Education Initiative (REACH-HEI) that acts as a pipeline for high
school and undergraduate students for careers in healthcare by providing free health sciences
education, motivation, and mentoring to increase representation of underrepresented
minorities in the health professions. Through this program I had the opportunity to explore my
interest in healthcare, foster relationships with other like-minded students that are now a part
of the industry like me, and mentor up-and-coming students from local communities that joined
with the same intentions that I once had.
The program has a variety of requirements some of which include attending out-of-
school lectures, being assigned a mentor (undergraduate student if mentee still in high school
and medical student if mentee in university) conducting research, learning about and practicing
basic procedures on artificial body parts, and completing community projects. Due to my
connection to the program as a former student member and knowing that I’d be going home
after the summer semester, I reached out to GCSOM’s pathway program coordinator as well as
former REACH-HEI student members that now work in the industry to see if I could organize a
talk/panel consisting of healthcare employees to fulfill my professional requirement. Although
my technical knowledge is limited to medical dosimetry, I represented radiation oncology given
the interprofessional collaboration that came with my internship at the Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center. Other professions represented in the group I put together included
nursing, speech pathology, and physical therapy.
I created a PowerPoint presentation to represent my profession and spoke about the
responsibilities of my role, the responsibilities of others in my department, and the general
workflow. I could not get into deep and technical dosimetry concepts that would be completely
foreign to the students, but I did draw on my clinical experience and University of Wisconsin-La
Crosse (UWL) courses to emphasize the importance of empathy and professionalism. As I
presented, I identified several areas of personal growth, the most important one to me being
that I realized that it had been over a year since I’d done anything to contribute to the education
of other students. I started enjoying myself as I watched my friends talk about their own
professions and as I spoke about my own. Being able to answer questions about my profession
with confidence and first-hand experience under my belt felt great as well. Please see a picture
uploaded to the program’s Instagram page.
Figure 1: Instagram post of event along with a picture of myself and a student named
Emis (who I’ve known for years because I mentored his big brother back when I was an
undergraduate student) who is now part of the REACH-HEI program.