How HOSA has impacted my life by Hannah

How HOSA has impacted my life by Hannah - December 2019 Scholarship Essay

How has an organization that I have been apart of impacted me? During my three and a half years in high school and counting, I have participated in many different organizations. But, the organization that has impacted me the most is HOSA. HOSA is a Health Care Career organization that is dedicated to helping not only the students in our school but also the people in our community. HOSA has taught me more about myself and has made me an overall more well-rounded person.

In HOSA, we visit our local nursing home every Thursday to spend time with the elderly there. We play games such as bingo, we eat a snack, and we talk about our days. We spend time making them gifts for Christmas such as decorated ornaments, small signs, and other things to help share the Christmas spirit with them. We go to the nursing home to hand out the gifts that we made, and being able to see how excited they are about are gifts is something that makes my day. Going to the Nursing home has helped me in learning about the care of the elderly, and if I would want to someday work with elderly patients. It helped me to decide that working with the elderly was something that I didn't want to do as a career in the future.

In HOSA we also have the opportunity to go job shadowing to help us to explore different careers in the Health Care field. We go to a hospital not too far from our school and spend some time with professionals, watching what they do in their day to day life. In my time in HOSA I have been able to job shadow a cardiologist and some people working in physical therapy. Doing these job shadows helped me to realize what parts of the healthcare field I liked, and what parts I didn't like. Job shadowing for the cardiologist helped me realize that going down that path was not for me, and helped me to make sure that I look for a different path that would better suit me.

Along with visiting the nursing home and going Job shadowing, we have also been trained to do vision and hearing screening. We took time from our day to learn how to do vision and hearing screenings on kids in Kindergarten to kids in second grade. Learning these skills not only made me more appreciative of the work that school nurses do to help the younger kids in our schools but also allowed me to work with kids, doing something that I had never done before. I was able to help our school nurse with screening the kids for a day, helping her to get through all of the kids in our Early Learning Center. This was an opportunity that I would not have been able to do if I had not been in HOSA.

HOSA is an organization that is always giving back, whether they are giving back to the school or other organizations. HOSA has created a "Cardinal Closet" for the students, which is a closet full of clothes that students can use if they are in need. They can take these clothes and put them to good use. All of the clothes are clothes that have been donated by the Cardinal Closet staff and students for anyone in the school in need. In HOSA we also do many different fundraisers. Each year we focus on a different organization that needs donations and raise money for them by either selling first aid kits, snack boxes, and even chocolate bars. This year we are raising money for the American Heart Association which is an organization that is near and dear to my heart. I was born with Congenital Heart Disease, so being able to give back and donate money to the people that helped me when I was younger makes me appreciate what we have done in HOSA.

HOSA has changed me as a person, making me more caring, more understanding of the world around me, and makes me feel more ready for my future. I feel like without HOSA I would have decided to go on a path that would not have lead me to success. Having been in HOSA makes me feel better about the challenges that I will face in my coming future because I feel much more prepared to face them.