Career Fair Presentation

I volunteered to participate in a local high school career fair in March. I volunteered to do this since my position is fairly new and a career field that will likely be growing. They are looking for more hands on experience for the students. I will have to give a presentation and will be giving it 5 times.

I don't feel to excited about any of the ideas I've had so far: Showing them how to build forms from scratch, making training videos, running reports for meaningful use....

I'm having a hard time coming up with ways to make it more interactive. I'm not sure how many students will be involved in each presentation and there will be limited use of computers, especially if we do anything using the EHR. Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated :)

Maybe pick from a selection of emerging technologies like robotics in healthcare,pain measuring sensors and medication delivery, patient identifier smartcards, mobile care and communications with their PCP, etc.

Videos, poster displays, sample peripherals they can handle along with your exciting presentation might be more enjoyable than logging onto the training system EMR?

I have volunteered to tutor high school kids on math. Interesting thing is that when they ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a nurse, but i work in the "computer" field. 9/10 will say, I didn't know nurses dealt with computers. So then I explain to them the career path I took and of course the obvious question is, so does it involve a lot of math? Really depends...

Anyway, how about talking about nursing in general and how there are many branches in nursing and how informatics is one of them? Then maybe do a day in the life of....and obviously, bring an ipad with you and login remotely with it to the hospital to keep the students' attention. Simple.

9/10 will say, I didn't know nurses dealt with computers. So then I explain to them the career path I took and of course the obvious question is, so does it involve a lot of math? Really depends....

This is EXACTLY why I volunteered to go to the career fair. I don't think most high school students realize that nursing can be involved in IT also. I do like the idea of talking about all the career paths nursing can take! Thanks for the advice everyone. We don't really use any tablets at this time with any of our software, BUT we did just get an IPAD in our department to practice with and see how it will work with our EHR. I'm thinking just letting them see how remote desktop works would keep them interested or does that sound too simple?