With donuts, KitKats, Goldfish, and an introductory presentation, the Brookfield Central HOSA chapter kicked off its year with its first meeting on Friday, November 9. Taking place in Mrs. Bansal’s room after school, the meeting was led by three juniors — Iksha Dhawan, Niki Vanselow, and Sania Arora.

HOSA, Health Occupation Students of America, is an international organization geared towards students interested in the medical field. Members have the opportunity to be involved with healthcare in their community, attend conferences, and participate in competition. Being an officially recognized organization, HOSA requires that students join a chapter in order to become official members. Becoming a certified chapter was one of the first tasks Dhawan, Vanselow, and Arora accomplished upon reviving the club.

HOSA was present during the 2016-17 school year, but it slowly died down over the course of the 2017-18 year. “I was in it freshman year actually, when Teja helped lead the club. It was actually really fun, but I just don’t think anyone really had the drive to really keep it moving forward. Once the seniors graduated, [no one] picked it back up, and it just kind of dissipated,” said Vanselow. While she didn’t participate in the club herself as a freshman, Dhawan took interest in HOSA through her search for a club pertaining to the medical field, having heard of the club from her friends at New Berlin Eisenhower. Both girls, along with Arora, took it upon themselves to reform the club, initially taking separate paths.

Dhawan started out at the end of the past school year by emailing Teja Paturu(‘18), the club’s former leader, asking for advice on how to move forward with the club. She then turned to Mrs. Bansal as a prospective advisor. Similarly, Vanselow and Arora looked to Mr. Hipp. When individual ventures were met with little success, the three decided to team up. Once Mrs. Bansal was secured as the advisor, the next step was to get HOSA approved as a school club.

Vanselow expressed some difficulties with the official approval process. “We were trying for a while, and it was just so hard to get [HOSA] going and get it through the administration. There was always a problem.” Dhawan echoed the sentiment: “I turned in the form in April and I kept coming back to school to check on if it was getting approved or not, but there was a lot going on, and [the administration wasn’t] sure what they were doing with clubs [or] how approval worked.”

The three met with Mr. Kurth at the start of this school year to clarify the approval process. They learned that aside from filling out a form and gaining approval from Mr. Kurth, they also had to run the club proposal by Inter Club Council, something that had changed from the previous year. The cancellation of the September ICC meeting further delayed the club’s formation. It was only after presenting to ICC during the October meeting that HOSA was approved.

A couple of weeks after getting approved, HOSA held its first meeting. With the promise of snacks, the club had a turnout of around forty to fifty students. The three juniors introduced HOSA at the meeting and had prospective members sign up for the Remind. Currently, over fifty students are on the remind. “It’s actually going surprisingly well,” remarked Vanselow, “we didn’t think that many people would join. If all these people decide to stay dedicated, we can definitely go to competitions in the future.”

In addition to competition, BC HOSA also named attending conferences and helping out the community as goals for the future, the final destination being making HOSA a prominent club at BC. As Vanselow said, “[It’d] be cool if HOSA could become the DECA of Brookfield Central. I think that’s the ultimate [goal].”