UPMC comes to Acrisure, bringing hands-on career discovery to Pittsburgh students

More than 600 students from around the Pittsburgh region got hands-on experience learning about careers in the medical field at a special career fair on Dec. 4.

UPMC brought the hospital experience to Acrisure Stadium, where instead of scoring points, students were scoring health metrics like blood cell counts seen through a microscope and heart rates using a Bluetooth stethoscope.

The job fair put on by UPMC is teaching students about more than 50 different careers related to medicine, using hands-on demonstrations including one that included pig lungs – one healthy and one that had been exposed to smoke.

“There was a healthy lung and, like, a dead lung,” West Allegheny High School senior Sarah Lowman. “In the healthy lung, we stuck a tool in it with a camera, and I maneuvered it a bunch of different ways to go through the cavities. And that was really neat.”

At the fair, students learned about jobs working in labs, imaging, nutrition, emergency medicine, pharmacy, sports medicine and more.

The jobs represented “everything from working in our hospitals, where they are patient-facing, to office jobs, to jobs behind the scenes, supporting patients,” said Erin Viale from UPMC Human Resources. “We have our actuary department here with a math game show. We have our legal department here.”

Serenity Adams, a senior at Carrick High School already knows that she wants to be an anesthesiologist. But she also loved learning about the pharmacy department.

“I went over there to get a little bit more insight,” Adams said, “because I saw they were working with insulin and stuff, and I’m a diabetic. So it was really interesting to see how they learned and how they were teaching other people how to inject insulin.”

Students were often surprised to learn that there are many jobs in health care that do not require a four-year college degree, and some will even help pay for college after working first.

“I definitely think that it helps with, like, financial troubles people have,” Adams said.

It was a school day spent learning about careers by actually talking with the people doing them – one of the best ways to learn and hopefully find a career that a student will love.