Last year, Wesal Haroun ’24 led HOSA through its first full year as a club after it was canceled partway through her sophomore year.
“I feel like people didn’t really get to see what it was before it was [called quits],” Haroun said.
HOSA, standing for Health Occupations Students of America, is a national organization that empowers future health professionals through education, collaboration, and experience. The club spends a large portion of its time preparing for the state competition in March, where students get to pick from events such as clinical nursing or sports medicine to compete in.
“HOSA allows for lots of areas to explore, the list of events just keeps on going, and if you didn’t want to do a physical event where you’re actively doing different physical procedures, you could also just do tests. There’s medical math [and] medical spelling, there’s a variety of different things that you can use to explore… You get to see and experience lots of different things within healthcare that you probably wouldn’t experience outside of the club,” Haroun said.
An average meeting consists of a chapter cup activity, which a chapter can do and submit for points. For the first couple weeks, club members focus on choosing which events interest them the most and becoming registered with the state and national organization. After members choose their events, the focus turns to practicing for the state competition.
Due to last year being its first full year, the club wasn’t able to participate in the state competition. They had to figure out a lot of logistics and ended up deciding to focus on participating in the test-based district competition and planning for next year.
“Once we figured out our events, we just start practicing, reviewing, making quizlets, just figuring out how to prepare for these events that we chose,” Haroun said.
Another important aspect of HOSA is community service.
“One of the biggest things that they want us to do as future health professionals, is community service, [which] is a really big part [of] it,” said Haroun. The club focused on brainstorming what to do for a community service event last year and hopes to participate in community service together this year.
HOSA’s first meeting is on Oct. 11, and will then continue to meet Wednesdays after school in room 12. If you’re interested in joining, reach out to Haroun at [email protected] or club advisor Andrea Harms at [email protected].
