Home News Future Medical Librarians at STEM Career Fair

Future Medical Librarians at STEM Career Fair

May 24, 2016 - 11:18am by Holly Grossetta Nardini

by Kate Nyhan

Librarian Kate Nyhan discusses a career in health sciences librarianship with four high school students.These future medical librarians are students at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven attending a career fair to learn about STEM careers. Research and education librarian Holly Grossetta Nardini, reference librarian Melissa Funaro, and public health librarian Kate Nyhan (pictured) talked with students from New Haven's public schools about what medical librarians do, how informationists fit into the health care team, and how these young people can prepare for STEM careers like ours.

We were impressed with the confident kids at this STEM career fair. Many of them already have career goals, and lots of them discussed quite sophisticated strategies for seeking and evaluating information online. A good number of these students have visited the Cushing Center and learned about the history of science and medicine there.

The best part of this career fair was interactive: live searches in PubMed on health care topics relevant to these students. Speaking of which -- are you the track coach whose runners found an article suggesting that a short warm-up is as effective as a long one? I promise we talked to these young athletes about the importance of searching comprehensively. If they cherry-picked this evidence to get out of doing the long warm-up, remind them that evidence-based medicine is based on a thorough literature review!

Many thanks to Many Mentors, the Yale League of Black Scientists, and Wilbur Cross High School. We were glad to be part of the STEM career fair team, and we look forward to next year. And in the long term, we hope we can look forward to welcoming some of these talented students to the always rewarding profession of medical librarianship!