Last Tuesday, LCC’s grade 11 enriched physics and chemistry class went to the Montreal Neurological Institute for an exciting day of seminars and presentations given by doctors, researchers and grad students. Along with approximately 300 students from Montreal-area schools, we participated in the annual regional edition of the TD Discovery Day. The Discovery Day is a program funded by TD Bank that gives students from across Canada, who are interested in pursuing careers in health sciences, the opportunity to visit hospitals and also talk with doctors and other health care professionals to get a better sense of what the field is actually like.

In the morning, upon our arrival, we sat down in a large auditorium at the Neuro to listen to the chairman of the Discovery Days program tell us about the goals of the program. She then introduced the first keynote speaker, Dr. Phil Gold, who talked about his career as a doctor and about how he got into medicine. After that, we attended our first seminar session, of which there would be two. My first seminar was called “Anatomy of the Human Brain,” and it proved to be very interesting. It was taught by four McGill neurology students and for an hour and a half they lectured about the brain and the various functions of the different cortexes, or zones. At the end of the seminar, we even had the chance to touch a real human brain and see what the different cortexes actually look like in real life. That was really cool!

After lunch, we attended our second seminar, which was given by a speech pathologist who spoke about speech impediments and, more specifically, how to treat them. We got to see and touch all of the various devices that speech pathologists use to do their jobs, such as artificial larynxes and text to speech converters, which was very interesting. When that was over, we returned to the auditorium for a final keynote. It was a panel of five health professionals who talked about their jobs and listened and responded to questions asked by the audience. This was cool because we got to hear about the daily lives of real health professionals and ask them questions about their jobs.

At the end of the day we returned to school, wiser, more experienced, and, for some of us, more passionate about what we want to do with our futures. — Giulian Etingin-Frati ’12