PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – More than 600 students from around the Pittsburgh region got hands-on experience learning about careers in the medical field at a special career fair on Wednesday. 

UPMC brought the hospital to Acrisure Stadium where instead of scoring points, students were scoring health metrics like blood cell counts looking through a microscope and heart rates using a Bluetooth stethoscope.

The job fair, put on by UPMC, taught students about more than 50 different careers related to medicine using hands-on demonstrations, including one using pig lungs; one healthy and one that had been exposed to smoke.

“There was a healthy lung, and like a dead lung, and in the healthy lung, we stuck a tool in it with a camera, and I maneuvered it a bunch of different ways to go through the cavities and that was really neat,” said West Allegheny High School senior Sarah Lowman.

At the fair, there were jobs working in labs, imaging, nutrition, emergency medicine, pharmacy, sports medicine and more.

“Everything from working in our hospitals, where they are patient-facing, to office jobs to jobs behind the scenes, supporting patients. We have our actuary department here with a math game show. We have our legal department here,” said Erin Viale, with UPMC Human Resources, when asked what jobs were represented at the career fair.

Serenity Adams is a senior at Carrick High School and already knows she wants to be an anesthesiologist, but she also loved learning about the pharmacy department.

“I went over there to get a little bit more insight,” Adams said, “Because I saw they were working with insulin and stuff, and I’m a diabetic, so it was really interesting to see how they learned and how they were teaching other people how to inject insulin.” 

Students were often surprised to learn that many jobs in health care do not require a four-year college degree, and some will even help pay for college after working there first.

“I definitely think that it helps with like financial troubles people have,” Adams said.

It was a school day spent learning about careers by talking with the people doing them, one of the best ways to learn and hopefully find a passion they love.