TMC PULSE

t m c » p u l s e | s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 9 36 AMELIA QUIZON, RN Class of 1996 PROFESSION | Registered nurse at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center When it came time to determine where she would go to high school, Amelia Quizon and her mother, now the DeBakey High secretary, decided DeBakey was the right place for her. "When I was in high school, we did clinicals at Ben Taub," Quizon said. "I was exposed to psych patients. You can't have that experience anywhere else. At DeBakey, they really show you what it means firsthand to be with a patient. I appreciated it because I got hands-on experience with it and I was able to realize, yes, this is the profession I want to go into." "It was literally a dream come true for me, because the documen- tary talked about exposure at the high school level to higher-level science classes, but also exposure to the clinical side of medicine, allow- ing [students] to shadow and work alongside various health profes- sionals," Campbell said. "I think the exciting thing was to have a mixed educational experience—academic rigor, but also kind of glimpse into the future of what you could do if you committed yourself to that rigor." Amelia Quizon, a graduate of the class of 1996, is now a registered nurse at MD Anderson. "No one in my immediate family had ever been to college, but I always knew I wanted to be a nurse," Quizon said. "My zoned school was nowhere near as excellent of a school as DeBakey is, so I wouldn't have had the opportunities that DeBakey offered me. I think with any profession, if you're not exposed to it, you don't know what it really entails." At the same time, that early, hands-on clinical exposure in high school may dissuade some students from a future in medicine. But that's not a bad thing. "I think our curriculum helps students clarify whether or not they want to go into medicine," Perry said. "Even if they don't go into med- icine, they can still do other things— they can be an accountant, be an attorney, they can even do other careers within the medical center without working with patients." For Amelia Quizon's husband, Paul Quizon, a graduate of the class of 1997, the integrated health sci- ence curriculum helped him realize that he did not want to be on the clinical side of health care. Today, he works as a senior financial analyst at MD Anderson. "Most people came into DeBakey wanting to go into the medical field, and a lot of people decide during the clinical rotations that medicine is their dream. But for me, it was the opposite," Paul Quizon said. "The school is very demanding, so even if you don't go into medicine, you are still very well prepared when you get to college." Over nearly five decades, the campus has changed locations and the student body has grown. What began with 45 students taking classes in the Cullen building at Baylor College of Medicine has become a nationally acclaimed high school of nearly 1,000 students with its own five-story building in the Texas Medical Center. The school relocated from a campus near State Highway 288 and North MacGregor Way to 2545 Pressler Street in the medical center in 2017. "The new campus gives us more access to the institutions," Perry said. "At our old location, our stu- dents had to be bussed every time there was an opportunity to come over. Dr. DeBakey always thought we should be … in the middle of the medical center." The new, 197,000-square-foot building boasts state-of-the-art lab equipment, mock hospital rooms and traditional classrooms. Although the high school does not have a formal alumni associa- tion and has not tracked the where- abouts of all of its alumni, the school does know that, all told, 197 students have matriculated through the Houston Premedical Academy. This pipeline program, which was started GEORGE AND ANGELINA KOSTAS RESEARCH CENTER FOR CARDIOVASCULAR NANOMEDICINE Annual International Meeting NOV. 13, 2019 • REGISTER TODAY events.houstonmethodist.org/kostasmeeting Houston Methodist Research Institute 6670 Bertner Ave., Houston, TX 77030 Course Directors: John P. Cooke, MD, PhD; and Alessandro Gra‰oni, PhD The emerging field of cardiovascular nanomedicine research offers great potential to revolutionize clinical care. Including nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, and molecular imaging, the multidisciplinary nature of this new frontier distinguishes it from traditional medical research. This conference will educate physicians and physician scientists about the various nanomedicine modalities that are critical to understanding the advantage, limitation, and appropriate utilization of the emerging technologies in patients with heart disease. Accreditation Statement Houston Methodist is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Call for Posters Cardiovascular Nanomedicine Poster Abstract Submission Deadline: October 16, 2019 See website for details.

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