Put Alexis Clarke into any situation involving surgery and she immediately focuses on the scenario unfolding before her.
That’s because becoming a surgeon is a life goal for Clarke, one of five students who recently graduated from the Medical Careers Exploration Program at children of the Earth High School.
The program, which is designed to introduce students to the possibility of a career in health care, was a perfect fit for Clarke.
“I want to become a surgeon,” she says. “I really liked watching surgery at Health Sciences, where I saw a liver resection and surgery on a hand. Then there was the Misericordia, where I saw eye surgery, and here at Pan Am, where they do surgery on knees and shoulders.”
Clarke has applied to attend the University of Winnipeg in the fall, and then hopes to apply to the University of Toronto’s Life Sciences Department, a path she hopes will eventually lead to medical school.
Unlike the other students in MCEP, who apply to the program in Grade 9, Clarke came to children of the Earth in the second semester of Grade 10. It didn’t take long before the school switched her from the regular track into MCEP. “My favourite courses were pre-calculus last semester and chemistry this semester,” she says, adding she loves anything to do with medicine.