An upcoming health conference is expected to draw 800 of South Dakota’s future doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators.
HOSA – or future health care professionals - is a career prep program for high school and college-aged students that aims to immerse the next generation of health care workers in the reality of the job.
Brock Rops is the executive director of the South Dakota HOSA chapter. He said these events reflect the reality of the career field.
“I talk a lot about job, career and calling," Rops said. "We try to get into a place of work that would be a calling more than anything else, and hopefully they learn how to pivot. If they’ve got aspirations to get into medical school and they don’t get in the first try that they’re able to pivot to something else. Things change, and life throws lemons at you, so you need to make lemonade out of those situations.”
He compares these HOSA events to FFA for future health care professionals.
“There’s presentation and project-based events, and then there’s also skill-based events like physical therapy, medlab science, dental and pharmacy and even forensic science,” Rops said.
Rops said its also a place for students to build confidence.
“A lot of students don’t know how broad those opportunities are, and so HOSA does its best to get students to understand that broad spectrum," Rops said. "I would say the majority of our students are interested in patient care careers, though we do have others that want to get into admin and IT and research and engineering – which is great as well.”
The conference will be hosted at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls April 11 and 12. Top finishers will have a chance to qualify for the upcoming international HOSA conference in Houston, Texas.