In Monterey County, 27 students are wrapping up the Summer Health Institute at Salinas Valley Health, closing out a five week program designed to give them a genuine look at what it takes to work in healthcare, at a moment when hospitals across the state are struggling to fill jobs.
The students rotated through departments across the hospital, sitting in on talks from nurses, lab technicians, hospital administrators and physicians before wrapping up with final presentations of their own.
For Gillian Guevara, 17, of Salinas, the biggest surprise wasn’t in a lecture hall or an operating room, it was realizing how much of a hospital runs on people who never touch a patient.
“Before this program, I originally thought healthcare was just occupations such as nurses or doctors,” she said. "But after the program, I found that there were so many other people in healthcare."
This is the point, says Dr. Robert Castro, medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Salinas Valley Health and a clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Castro has run the mentorship side of the Summer Health Institute since 2009, and he says introducing students to careers they’ve never heard of—hospital administration, radiology, informatics, public relations—is one of the most valuable things the program does.
He’s also honest with students about how long the road really is. Castro walks them through the math: a few more years of high school, four years of college, four years of medical school, then years of residency and fellowship, depending on the specialty. It's not meant to discourage anyone, he says, it's meant to reset expectations before students commit to a path.
His bigger goal is recruiting students who identify with the patients that the hospital treats.
“It is imperative we get a lot of individuals that have backgrounds that are similar to our patients that we take care of,” Castro said.
Furthermore, he doesn't hesitate when telling students the playing field isn’t always fair.
“They’re going to be competing with students whose parents were physicians. Most of these students don’t have that advantage," he said. "They have to realize: this is a challenge that I have to face, but I’m ready for it.”
It's a lesson Castro says he learned firsthand. He grew up without doctors or other medical professionals in his family, before building a career that took him from Los Angeles to San Antonio and eventually to the Central Coast.
For Luis Urias Hernandez, a senior from Marina, one of the program's biggest values was different than science, it was getting to do all of it close to home.
“I know my community, I was raised here, and I was able to interact with so many community members," he said. "And just being able to learn from that was immense.”
Hernandez says being able to speak with patients in their own language, and understand what they need firsthand, is something he expects to carry with him no matter which health career he ultimately chooses.
Even after seeing the harder, more exhausting sides of hospital work up close, students say the experience didn't scare them off; if anything, it helped them see more clearly where they might fit. And that, Castro says, is really the goal. Not every student needs to become a doctor, but the hospital needs all of them, in one role or another.
