HOSA is a club at Amador that allows students to pursue their passions in the medicine and healthcare fields. Their mission revolves around giving students opportunities to find their passion in various healthcare professions.

“HOSA is a club designed to help students find their place in the vast field of healthcare and medicine. Our mission is to introduce students to many different positions inside the healthcare fields so that they can get a glimpse into what it looks like and they can decide what their future is,” said AV HOSA President Uma Maveli (‘21).

AV HOSA’s advisor is Diana Hasenflug, one of the Physical Education and Sports Medicine teachers at Amador. 

“Her role is to look over what we’re doing and help us with our various club activities. We do most of the planning and we take her advice and she’s there for us when we need to book plane tickets and all of that,” said Maveli.

HOSA hosts events and competitions at Amador as a way for members to reenact medical emergencies, take medical tests, and projects, and get a true sense of working in the healthcare field.

“Recently we hosted an Innovation Challenge and it’s still going on where the club members have to design a project that addresses some aspects of a disease. For example we chose HIV, substance abuse, and COVID-19. They have to make some kind of original project to address these issues, and we’re also thinking of doing Minicon, which is a “medical competition” if you will, where we have [members] reenact events that would occur in the medical field, for example CPR, first aid, and we also have written tests where they have to, it’s like a multiple choice exam, and they have to answer all these questions,” said AV HOSA Vice-president of activities Yena Cho (‘22).

While AV HOSA is a club at Amador, it is much more than that. HOSA is an international student organization that has 54 chartered HOSA organizations all over the world, California being one of them.

“HOSA stands for Health Occupation Students of America, we’re just trying to introduce people to the field of healthcare and we kind of have two main competitions which include SLC, State Leadership Conference, as well as Minicon. Minicon is kind of an introduction to SLC where students can come participate and they can pick different fields that they’re interested in, for example there’s medical terminology, clinical nursing, biomedical science, these are all various aspects of medicine students can choose from,” said AV HOSA Vice-president of competitions Soumya Appalla (‘22). 

The 2020 HOSA officers are organized and diligent. They work together to plan events, meetings, and competitions.

“We usually meet over the weekend like on Sunday or just before we have our meeting which are primarily on Monday. We just collaborate together and figure out our agenda for our next meeting. Right now we’re doing the Innovation Challenge so we’ve been working on that and trying to make sure that all our members know what’s going on,” said the AV HOSA Junior Officer Sahana Sundar (‘23).

While there are many science and medical-based clubs at Amador, AV HOSA thrives on interactive participation with various events that offer students more opportunities in the field. 

“The SIMs club, Students Interested in Medical Science, [HOSA] is a little bit like that but a bit more competitive, where SIMS is more like introducing you to a variety of careers, HOSA is doing the same thing but it’s also deeper in a way, you get to actually have hands-on experience and learn a little bit more by having these competitions and events,” said Cho.

With online learning in full swing, AV HOSA is using Zoom to continue their meetings and events virtually.

“Since everything is online, it’ll mostly be demos and stuff like that, one example that we’re planning on having is suturing, because that is a basic skill that students can learn and you can do it easily at home on like a fruit or something like that,” said the AV HOSA Treasurer Kia Chaudhary (‘22).

AV HOSA hosts Minicon, a small competition for members and interested applicants to participate in based on their medical field of interest.

“Basically we do Minicon, we have the State Leadership Conference, which is SLC, it’s at the end of March and we usually go to southern California or northern California, all the chapters from California come together to participate in this big competition and we allow our members to choose a specialty that they want to participate in, like clinical nursing, biomedical sciences. Basically we have a smaller version of that at Amador that we do every year, it’s called Minicon and we host it, SLC is only for people who take an R.O.P. or PLTW course, so Minicon is open to the whole Amador community, anyone can participate. It’s just to get a glimpse into and feel the pressure and perform well in a scenario,” said Maveli.

The HOSA officers are quick to reply back to emails and messages through various social media platforms.

“Since there’s a lot of us, we all check Instagram really regularly, we’re always on Instagram replying back to DMs, that’s a great way to communicate with us. We also do have an email, we’re also really good with that, like replying back and getting back with them in a couple of hours most likely. We also have Facebook, Remind, and Google Classroom, so these three are just there on the side, but I feel like the major two ways if you want to join or communicate with us would be either through email or Instagram,” said the AV HOSA Secretary Trisha Jain (‘22). 

For any students interested in AV HOSA or a possible career path in the healthcare field, be sure to participate in the Innovation Challenge continuing until the end of October.

“It’s a great way to get their creativity flowing, work with a group, especially amidst like online learning it’s hard to coordinate with groups so this would just be a really great opportunity for them to network with other students and learn more about healthcare. Our Innovation Challenge actually ends at the end of this month, so October 31st. Teams still have the opportunity to join,” said Appalla.

AV HOSA continually has events and challenges that help members learn and reenact medical situations, aiding them in their journey towards possible healthcare professions.

“After we finish the Innovation Challenge, if [members are] kind of busy through October we’ll have our first Minicon coming up in November, it’s going to be just workshop based just to introduce students to like suturing, CPR, and other various aspects and basics of healthcare. So if they’re interested in that it’s going to be all virtual but I think it might be a way to interact with us and we can get to everyone,” said Maveli.