Butler Memorial Hospital hosts nearly 100 students for Career Day event
There are more to hospitals than just nurses and doctors.
Positions not often thought of may include dietary specialists, radiology technicians, accountants and so much more, but they all still aim to serve one main purpose, according to Dr. David Rottinghaus, president of the Physicians Network at Butler Memorial Hospital.
“No matter what you start as, you are working as a team,” Rottinghaus said. “The goal is to meet the needs of the patients. There are so many levels to this team and that’s what makes it so fun.”
About 90 students from Butler and Knoch high schools got a chance to learn about these positions and more during Butler Memorial Hospital’s 2024 Career Day event on Monday, March 25.
To kick off the event, Rottinghaus and Mindy Dunkerley, chief of nursing for Independence Health System at Butler Memorial Hospital, spoke to the students about what they do and took questions from the 9th through 12th grade students.
Rottinghaus said one of the main challenges that comes from working in a hospital setting is the sometimes 80-hour work weeks that people have to go through.
“We are taught in school to roll with the punches,” Rottinghaus said. “Again, we try to be a team and give those people who are burning out the resources they need.”
After the speakers finished, students were then broken up into small groups, who then rotated between tables around the hospital, which were hosted by experts in a variety of medical fields.
“We want to show them all the different avenues they can go in at a hospital,” said Sheila Neff, clinical advancement educator at Butler Memorial Hospital. “Our goal now is to show the kids that there is whole lot more than nurses and doctors. While that is a super important part of a hospital, we could not function without these other groups as well.”
One of the best ways to start a career in a hospital setting, Neff said, would be for high school and college students to get an externship at a hospital.
This is where instead of completing job tasks which are done during an internship, externs simply shadow professionals to learn more about the field.
“They are all paid positions,” Neff said on Butler Memorial Hospital’s externship program. “It normally lasts about a year. Once they graduate they are all guaranteed jobs here. Some of the nurses here now have stayed once they completed it and they feel it helped them because it gave them real life experience, which backed up what they were learning in class.”
Butler high school senior Adriana Warnick said she wanted to learn more about the education process during the Career Day event before she goes attends Duquesne University this coming fall.
“I'm hoping to go into anesthesia,” Warnick said. “I feel I like would like that aspect of surgery, while not actually being the surgeon.”
