Burnett School of Medicine at TCU Students Become Teachers And Role Models For Young Kids During Mini Med School Program

FORT WORTH – A group of 40 junior high and high school students gathered in a corner of a classroom inside TCU’s Sid W. Richardson Physical Sciences Building putting on scrubs and gloves for a lesson on dissection using cow eyeballs.

They broke off into smaller groups at long black high-top tables and watched as Haya Qadurra, a Senior and Pre-medical major at TCU, took a small scalpel and made incision marks around an eyeball.

“Oh my goodness,” Alivia Offord, an 11th grader at V.R. Eaton High School said.

Offord’s eyes opened wide as Qadurra handed her the scalpel.

“You’re going to cut this all the way down,” Qadurra said.

A classmate, Jarvis Lard, an 11th grader at Steele Early College High School, leaned over Offord’s shoulder with a grimaced look on his face as she chiseled the eyeball in half.

“Oh my god it looks like slime and look it’s blue,” Offord said. “I’m so glad I have on gloves.”

Qadurra picked up the eye lens and explained its functions and how it connects to the body. Most middle and high school students don’t get this level of exposure to medicine, according to Ric Bonnell, M.D., Assistant Professor at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University.

“There’s nothing like that hands-on holding that eyeball taking the lens out and looking at it,” Dr. Bonnell said. “I expect kids to not just enjoy this but remember it for a long period of time and hopefully it inspires a lot of them to go into health care.”

In early June, the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU held a weeklong Mini Med School summer program for middle and high school students in Fort Worth. The program was run through the medical school’s Service Learning & Community Engagement curriculum from a grant they received. The goal is to spark an interest in medicine in young kids and teach them more about careers in health care they may not be aware of.

“We’re having them be mentored by our medical students and pre-med students at TCU and we also want them to have a lot of fun,” Dr. Bonnell said.

For five days the students participated in an Introduction to Medicine, Slice of Science: Dissection & Narcan Awareness, Community Health and Awareness, Simulation Lab, and Case Study courses. The curriculum aimed to dispel the Hollywood version of how doctors and nurses work to solve complex cases.

“On the first day we treated them like we treat our medical students or my medical residents at the hospital,” Dr. Bonnell said. “We gave them real patient cases in groups and had them be detectives and try to figure it out.”

The Student Becomes The Teacher

Midway through the week students met Ethan Vieira, MS4 at Burnett School of Medicine, for the Community Health and Awareness course. It involved more discussion among him and the students than the hands-on exercises earlier in the week.

“What do you all know about vaping are people doing it,” Vieira said.

The room full of high schoolers answered, yes, in unison. He followed that up with another question.

“Are they doing it at school and how do they do it at school,” Vieira said. Again, in unison, they responded with a very specific answer.

“In the bathroom,” the students said.

Two months earlier Vieira designed this presentation for middle and high school students with Dr. Bonnell’s help. The presentation called, “The Effects of Smoking, Vaping and Tobacco Use,” came out of his own experience as a sixth grader.

“The D.A.R.E. curriculum and the impact that had on me is why I chose to this point to never smoke or try recreational drugs,” Vieira said. “I just I remember this hairy tongue that they showed us that has stuck with me forever.”

Vieira shared tidbits of his own personal experiences dealing with peer pressure to smoke and clinical experiences with patients who are smokers. He’s only a few years removed from undergraduate education and high school, so he understands how inundated young people are with images of smoking.

“People on social media are making rings with smoke and doing tricks showing a side of smoking that they try to make look cool,” Vieira said. “Part of my job and giving this talk and something I try to show is that’s like 0.02% of it. The reality of smoking are the risks to your health and the risks to the health of those around you.”

This is how the Burnett School of Medicine inspires medical students to not only be life-long learners but also life-long teachers, according to Dr. Bonnell.

“Our medical students are teaching high school, undergrad, and junior high students and they’re starting to learn and model that behavior,” Dr. Bonnell said. “They’re going to need to do this well for the rest of their life and careers. It’s a win-win for both sides.”

Leaving A Lasting Impact

On the final day students were partnered with a medical student or pre-medical student mentor for a high-paced activity called, “Stop The Bleed.”

Dr. Bonnell cued up Leona Lewis’s hit song “Bleeding Love” on a Bluetooth speaker and began timing the students as they stuffed gauze bandage into a piece of foam with an open hole.

Aleyah Akuma, 11th grader at Trimble Technical High School, quickly stuffed the gauze bandage into the hole as Dr. Bonnell watched counting. Once she filled the hole, she stood up, crossed her hands together, put them over the hole and applied pressure. 

“Make sure you keep pressure on it through your entire arm,” Dr. Bonnell said. 

He counted to ten and then told her to relax.

“Congratulations you did it you stopped the bleed,” Dr. Bonnell said.

Akuma smiled. This was her second time participating in an activity put together by the Burnett School of Medicine and its Service Learning & Community Engagement curriculum.

“I want to go into medicine so I’ll be here again next summer,” Akuma said.

The exposure to medicine doesn’t stop with the weeklong program. The students will meet up with the Service Learning team again in August before returning to school for the Fall.

This program is all about piquing their interest in becoming a doctor or the other allied health professions and growing their knowledge base, Dr. Bonnell added.

“We want to expose them to as many different areas of medicine we can,” Dr. Bonnell said.