Virginia Beach students explore career options through immersive Internship Day
VIRGINIA BEACH — More than two dozen Princess Anne High School students were taken to Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital on Thursday morning.
But they weren't patients.
The Central Business District Association in Virginia Beach hosted its 33rd Internship Day, when students are matched with careers and businesses based on their interests. The CBDA organized more than 100 students and businesses to best match them for the program, and businesses hosted the students for the entire morning to discuss career options.
Jeanne Evans-Cox, executive director for the CBDA, said students fill out applications and rank the top three jobs they might be interested in pursuing. Then, she and school counselors come together to match them with local businesses. The Internship Day supports a variety of interests and career paths, she said. From law and health care to architecture and construction, there's a place for everybody.
'It's really fun to see how creative the companies get,' she said. 'Some of the lawyers will take the kids to court, and some of them have actually sat in on criminal cases. The kids come back, and they're just so excited, which is cool.
'They've had hard-hat tours of construction sites. One of (the businesses) got up on a crane and put them on the top of a building. They've laid out buildings and interior design. We've taken them to restaurants, so they get to watch the culinary world. We've even had chocolate-making.'
During Sentara's Internship Day, more than two dozen students interested in health care were divided into small groups and visited various departments, including operating rooms, the maintenance department, labs, the pharmacy and the emergency division.
Gerald Guzman, 18,and three of his classmates were led to the operating room for their first rotation Thursday. After donning hair nets, shoe covers and 'bunny suits' — sterile coveralls to prevent contamination — they toured two operating rooms.
In the first, hospital staff showed them a da Vinci Surgical System, or robotic-assisted surgical platform that allows surgeons to perform complex procedures with small incisions. In the other, students received hands-on instruction for keeping an operating room sterile and how certain instruments are used during surgeries.
'It's very immersive,' Guzman said. 'We were actually able to touch the tools and see how they are applied when they are actually operating on people. It's just interesting to me that it's such a complex process. It probably takes a while to learn, but in the end, it must be very gratifying for your patients and for yourself to know how much hard work you just put in to help someone.'
Over the years, the interest in health care jobs has grown, and that was the largest group of CDBA's Internship Day. Bernie Boone, president of Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital, said his career in hospital administration started in a similar program, and Internship Day allows students to get an inside look at how the hospital functions and insight into occupations not as well known as physicians or nurses.
'That's what attracted me to the field of health service administration — just the vast diversity of health professions that exist,' Boone said. 'Opportunities like this hopefully will open their eyes that there are many opportunities that are broader than just more popular professions in regards to nursing or physicians.
'Whether it's speech pathology, occupational therapy, laboratory technicians, health therapists, radiation (or) radiology technicians, there's just a whole host of other health care professionals that make up the care team.'
Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com
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