Avary Talarico, left, of Kamloops, and Tia Fellix, of Enderby, streak a petri dish.

Bradley James, of Lillooet, performs the initial stages of a water test.

Tessie Tom, of Merritt, streaks a petri dish with bacteria samples.

Sixteen Aboriginal high school students are learning there is an abundance of options in health sciences at Thompson Rivers University that are fun and rewarding.

The students are attending a summer camp that has a strong focus on careers in the health sciences. The days have been chock full of hands-on science-themed activities like taking swabs and analyzing the results to tours of TRU, the TRU Science building, TRU’s learning support services, Royal Inland Hospital and the Adams Lake Health Centre. The non-science activities have included mini-golf, indoor rock climbing and movie night. To further make the students feel special, they’ve been staying overnight at the TRU Residence and Conference Centre.

“This has been really helpful for me,” says Simon Casper, who will be starting Grade 9 at Lillooet Secondary School this fall. “We get to see the environment you’d be working in and I did get a better idea of the career possibilities.”

Bradley James is also from Lillooet and going into Grade 9 in September.

“I got a more vivid image of how this helps people. It reminded me of House, the TV show,” says James. A camp highlight was microbiology and in particular, swabbing Casper’s forehead and learning what microscopic organisms were living there that day.

Only three of the 16 are from Kamloops, with the rest from small communities like Lillooet, Clinton, Merritt, Chase, Sorrento, Enderby and other parts of the Shuswap. The camp, the first of its kind at TRU for Aboriginal students, is a partnership between TRU Nursing and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society.

There are a few objectives of the Monday to Friday camp, among them: for students to realize the various learning support services at the university, for campers to view health sciences careers as right for them, and for the students to want to work those jobs in Aboriginal communities. These aims are part of a bigger goal of improving health conditions in Aboriginal communities.

While Casper and James have some years to decide what’s next after high school graduation, Avary Talarico of Kamloops is facing a tighter deadline. Her Grade 12 year at Valleyview Secondary School begins this September. That said, she’s solid in her belief the health sciences are right for her.

And the camp went a long way to cementing that.

This (the camp) been helpful for me. It’s given me a taste of university life and it’s given me a better idea of all the different jobs that are out there,” says Talarico. “This has confirmed that I want to keep with human studies.”