Gateway Summer Springboard Trip to Harvard Medical School

As we head into our second year of Gateway at the O'Bryant School, we have introduced a two-week Summer Springboard institute to smooth the academic transition into our ninth-grade program. Emmanuel College has generously opened up its campus to our students for this experience. This central LMA location provides us with the opportunity to combine our morning academic classes in English and math with career and college explorations in the afternoons.

This afternoon, the twenty Springboard participants plus staff visited the campus of Harvard Medical School, just down the street from Emmanuel College. We began with a guided tour of the Warren Anatomical Museum, inside Harvard Medical School's Countway Library of Medicine. (This is the second time in the past two months that the Warren Museum has hosted groups of Gateway students, and we are most grateful for this unique opportunity to look back through the history of medicine!) Dr. Sheila Nutt of HMS' Office for Diversity and Community Partnership then provided our new Gateway students with a brief introduction to the many high school enrichment opportunities offered through their office. As we did last year, we will continue to keep Gateway students posted about all of the HMS enrichment opportunities available throughout the school year.

We then concluded our visit with a hands-on experience in HMS' Gilbert Medical Simulation laboratory. The photos below follow Team Hines' efforts to stabilize a patient experiencing an asthma attack. (I regret to report that in the other room, Team Figueroa lost its patient who was suffering from a heart attack.)

A big thank you to Dr. Sheila Nutt for arranging this amazing early Gateway experience for our new students!

At first, students were a bit nervous about touching the simulation dummy...

...but that didn't last very long, after we saw all of the medical equipment that we were allowed to try out on the dummy.

We had to figure out how to work as a team, in a "crisis" situation...

...and it certainly helped to have an expert talking dummy to give us key advice along the way ("I want to talk to my primary care physician!").