Foraying into a career of medical services, aspiring pre-medical students took a huge step forward at the Health Science Career Fair, organized by Westwood Academy Ambassadors and the Health Science Academy, on Friday, Feb. 22, in the library during first block, Flex, and A lunch.

The event hosted multiple health science university programs demonstrating different paths, such as Concordia University’s nursing program and Texas State University’s radiation therapy program. While walking through the career fair, students chatted with directors or university students stationed at each booth. Program representatives answered questions, with many also handing out four year plans for a specific degree as further guidance.

“All the colleges and businesses were really helpful,” Simmi Pesnani ‘27 said. “They added on to my decision on where I would want to go and what I want to do with all the certifications that I know about.”

Another attention-grabbing aspect of the fair were each booth’s interactive elements and customized free merchandise. Many walked out of the event with sweatshirts, tote bags, and water bottles.

“I loved being able to look through all the goodies and how immersive it was,” Pesnani said. “ I think it was definitely a success and it was really fun, so it should be a continued tradition every year.”

Connecting to industry professionals and managing the student attendees had been an arduous process for Academy Ambassadors’ Health Science Committee officers. In the end, though, the fair had proved to be an organized and valuable event.

“The hardest part was managing the students who wanted to come,” Academy Head Tanisha Patel ‘26 said. “We decided to pull students from class [from] first block and to do this in rotations, but there are nearly 700 students in the Health Science Academy, so we had to manually sort through this to figure out rotations. [On the] day of, we had to distribute the passes as well, so that was very difficult and hectic, making sure we accounted for every single student was very difficult and hectic.”

Volunteers strived to establish a welcoming environment for incoming students. This effective outreach led to students coming in to check out the fair despite no prior involvement in a health science class.

“[As a volunteer], we worked on creating stuff like the posters, goodie bags and items for the industry professionals that came in,” Patel said. “We also were able to help set up the event by putting the tables together as well as just talking to [students] and acting as representatives.”

Though it was a great struggle for the volunteers to manage last minute problems, including having to hand out passes to 700 students the morning of the event, the student organizers persevered in their efforts. Despite the difficulties, they were gratified to note the immense attention the event drew.

“Getting to sit back in the event, and watch everything was really great, especially [since] we had a lot of stuff to fix [at the] last minute,” Patel said. “[Seeing] that pay off and that everything was running smoothly was great. I got to hear some student feedback in real time that they were enjoying the event, and even later we found out that we had 900 student attendees, which was 200 more than we projected. I [felt] happy and [thought] that we had a very successful event as well.”