High School and Laboratory Medicine Students Connect at Annual NextPo Event

NextPo has become a staple at the ASCP Annual Meeting over the past decade. Created to address one of the root causes of the workforce shortage awareness, ASCP invites high school students from the host city to participate. NextPo is an interactive, educational, and career discovery event that pulls back the curtain on laboratory careers while students are starting to make choices about their future education and career paths.

While awareness is the first step, growing engagement and active exploration of laboratory careers is just as critical. To increase this engagement, NextPo created the NextPROs program. NextPROs are current medical laboratory students—near-peers closer in age—who can speak to the training and education needed for laboratory careers. These students infuse the event with relatability and build easier connections with the high schoolers.

“It was so cool to talk to high school students who weren’t familiar with the different jobs in a laboratory setting and to see those roles through their eyes,” shared ASCP NextPRO Alexis McCallar, a student in the Pathologists’ Assistant program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. “I’m from a small town. Kids there don’t realize how many jobs there are in the medical field besides being a doctor. I knew I wanted to go into medicine, but I didn’t want to focus on patient care. If I had gone to NextPo as a high school student, I would have decided on my career path much earlier.”

Phuong Huynh, an ASCP NextPRO and MLS student at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, GA, agreed. “Being a NextPRO was so much fun! I am always advocating for students to get into STEM and learning about the wide variety of careers they can work in. NextPo was such a cool way for high school students to discover jobs you wouldn’t think exist in the medical field.”

Reflecting on her academic journey, Ms. Huynh noted, “I started college in pre-med, but I realized being a doctor was not for me. I worked part-time in a hospital microbiology lab during college, where the lab techs explained what medical laboratory scientists were and the path to become one.”