Community Engagement

Hope Project: Update

Eight years ago, the Department of Radiology became the first donor to the HOPE (Health Occupations and Professions Exploration) Project, an initiative to provide career pathways education and guidance to students seeking careers in healthcare. In 2013, the project started with 120 students, and today, over 400 students participate annually. Since 2013, the HOPE Summer Internship program has had over 500 interns and is the first to recruit high school interns in the UW Health system.

The program’s growth includes new opportunities to serve more age groups. The HOPE Project now offers programs for middle school students, including field trips, internships, and career exploration events. It has also expanded its programming to high school students, now offering apprenticeships that allow students to earn college credit. College students also can participate in HOPE’s offerings through various mentorship, internship, scholarship, and apprenticeship programs. Lastly, adults can participate through an apprenticeship (Medical Assistant, Nursing Assistant, Phlebotomy, Pharmacy Tech, maintenance, skilled work), short-term work experience, and scholarships. The apprenticeship programs’ participants have been 87% people of color and 100% meeting one or more underrepresented demographics. Ninety-one percent of participants report that their apprenticeship is their first educational experience after high school.

Bridgett Willey, PhD, HOPE Project Founder said, “We’re addressing exploratory opportunities; we’re increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in health care; and we’re addressing workforce needs. I’m really happy to say we can do all of those now with this set of programs.”

Learn more about getting involved with the HOPE Project today: https://hopemadisonwi.org/get-involved/

Tim Szczykutowicz Organizes Virtual Fieldtrip with Urban League of Madison

Tim Szczykutowicz, PhD recently organized a virtual fieldtrip for over 30 seventh and eighth graders, mostly from Wright Middle School, for Project REACH of the Urban League of Madison. Project REACH aims to help students begin to develop their post-secondary and career goals in middle school so that they enter high school prepared for a rigorous pre-college curriculum. The virtual fieldtrip focused on teaching radiology, medical physics, and biomedical engineering. The curriculum was taught in four one-hour blocks.

Block 1: “Radiology Imaging Machine” – Professor Tim Szczykutowicz, PhD (Radiology)

Block 2: “Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning” – Sydney Anna Jupitz (Medical Physics) Block 3: “Gene Editing with Cas9 and CRISPR” – Namita Khajanchi (Biomedical Engineering)

Block 4: “Find the Cancer Exercise” – Lindsay Stratchko, DO (Radiology)

Dr. Szczykutowicz said, “I got involved with the efforts of Mr. Brown and Urban League of Madison over the last school year via virtual tutoring of Wright Middle School kids. When Mr. Brown said he could use sites to provide field trips, I jumped at the chance to expose these young scholars to projects in Radiology, Medical Physics, and Biomedical Engineering. I wanted to get a lot of different perspectives from the UW side to show these students what a career in STEM looks like in healthcare.”