Careers

Careers Fair

This year, as one of the school’s Careers Representatives, I was delighted to help Miss Parr organise the Careers Fair. In my role, I had the opportunity to meet and greet the speakers and the girls, and generally being on hand at the event itself. The NHEHS Careers Fair has to be one of the busiest school events and this year was no exception. This year, it was all about ‘more’ – we had more speakers, more careers on show and more girls attending than ever before.

“from Architecture to Zoology and everything in between”

There was a fantastic buzz to the evening as girls moved around the hall, finding out about the many possible options. The careers ranged across all sectors from Architecture to Zoology and everything in between. All in all, it was an exhilarating, informative but tiring evening and it was great to hear all of the positive feedback from everybody at school in the following days.

Lara Defries, Year 12

Inaugural MedSoc Conference

Just as England and Columbia were kicking off on 3rd July, we were halfway through an epic programme of lectures organised by the Year 12 MedSoc Representatives. In spite of my poor choice of date for the event, we had a good-sized audience of NHEHS girls from Years 10-12 and Year 12 students from local schools. Over the evening we heard from various speakers:

Piriyanga Kesaven is a 5th Year medical student at Imperial College London, representing Kaplan. She spoke about the UKCAT and BMAT entrance tests for all medical schools.

Dr Nihal Shah is a Consultant Oncologist at the Mount Vernon Hospital. He discussed cancer causes, treatments and advances. I was astonished to hear that mustard agents (nerve gases) are now being used as drugs for chemotherapy.

Dr John Keen, a GP, described how he sometimes has to tease out the real issue from the patient and he went on to outline examples of some of the really difficult decisions that he has had to make.

Dr Mike Brunner is Consultant Anaesthetist in Intensive Care at Northwick Park Hospital. He led a highly engaging discussion of the thin division between withdrawal of treatment and murder as legally defined in the case of Hillsborough victim Tony Bland. More recently, doctors at Great Ormand Street Hospital were trying to offer baby Charlie Gard dignity in death, against the understandable wishes of his parents who were clinging to an impossible hope of recovery and mobilising social media in their cause.

Pankaj Chandak, a surgeon and researcher in organ transplantation, brought the evening to a rousing end when he spoke about advances in surgery, from Joseph Lister’s invention of antisepsis to the current day. He described how robotic surgery enables the surgeon to much more easily carry out delicate manipulations such as stitching together blood vessels.

Congratulations to the Year 12 team of Lucy Whittock, Lisa Vashchenko, Sharuka Ravichandran and especially Rinda Naresh who took the lead in organising this highly successful event.