The Career Exploration Alliance was created in 2012 and was started by eight professionals from the St. Charles County Vision Leadership program. The CEA sets up job shadow opportunities for all 5 St. Charles County School districts to participate in. These districts include St. Charles, Francis Howell, Fort Zumwalt, Lincoln, and Wentzville. There are three weeks of shadows in the fall and another three weeks in the spring and the program plans to continue as long as there are students who want to participate.

There are many different types of shadows for people to choose from and many companies provide a wide variety within the fields they are a part of. I got to participate in job shadows in both the fall and spring sessions. In the fall, I got to shadow a Pediatrician at Compass Health and in the spring I shadowed a nurse from a Med Surg department at Mercy.

Even though I wasn’t able to shadow in the exact department I am interested in, I still learned a lot from these experiences. Both shadows helped me learn about other options in the medical field and allowed me to confirm that surgery is what I want to pursue in the future.

When I shadowed the pediatrician, it made me realize that I don’t really want to work with kids when I am older. I saw how much patience it took for him to be able to effectively treat his patients and for him to be able to effectively explain things to their guardians. While this is a trait I admire, it is not one that I possess.

When I shadowed in the Med Surg department, I learned about the more “mundane” tasks that have to be done to provide care for patients. While most of the tasks a nurse has to do aren’t necessarily exciting or fun, I felt like I got to experience how they are just as important as what a doctor or surgeon might do. If there wasn’t someone to collect all the information from the patient, administer medicines, and do all other tasks that nurses take care of, it would be hard for doctors to spend time diagnosing patients. Nurses allow for everything else to run smoothly and are the glue that holds things together. While this is not what I am specifically interested in, I think learning this is still something that will help me become a better surgeon in the future.