Beyond the Stethoscope: The Full Spectrum of Healthcare.
Most students interested in biology grow up believing healthcare is an either/or choice: you either wear a white coat as a doctor, or scrubs as a nurse. We started PrePro to change that.
Why We Built PrePro
As high schoolers exploring future careers in healthcare, we ran into the exact same wall every student faces: either you memorize vocabulary terms for AP Biology exams, or you spend months trying to find a doctor to shadow - only to stand silently in a hallway corner for four hours because privacy laws don't allow teenagers to touch anything or interact with patients.
We loved biology and medicine, but the traditional extracurricular path felt completely disconnected from clinical reality. In after-school clubs, meetings were often limited to one-way lectures, passive slide presentations, and routine discussions that never gave students a feel for real clinical problem-solving. Meanwhile, almost nobody in our schools knew what a perfusionist, a clinical pharmacist, or a radiologic technologist actually does.
So we decided to do something different. We reached out directly to medical students, surgical fellows, and practicing healthcare specialists in our community. We asked them: “What does your team actually do every morning? What do you wish someone had shown you when you were 16?”
With their clinical guidance and mentorship, we built The PrePro Project: an interactive, student-run platform where high schoolers can solve real diagnostic case huddles, test-drive authentic hospital care-team consoles in their browser, and have candid conversations with people actually working in healthcare.
- The Cardiovascular Perfusionist: Operates the heart-lung machine standing two feet from the cardiac surgeon, keeping the brain and kidneys oxygenated while the surgeon repairs the heart.
- The Clinical Hospital Pharmacist: Rounds with the ICU attending physician every morning to calculate renal drug clearance and intercept lethal drug interactions before prescriptions reach the patient.
- The Pathologists' Assistant: Performs macroscopic tumor dissections and determines surgical margins while the patient is still on the operating table.
- The Radiologic Technologist: Calibrates 3D multi-planar MRI and CT scanners to illuminate cerebral aneurysms and hidden tissue tears.
- The Genetic Counselor: Translates complex DNA sequencing data into empathetic, actionable decisions for families.
Many of these essential professions require 1 to 2 years of graduate schooling instead of a decade of residency, avoid quarter-million-dollar medical school debt, and pay six-figure compensation ($110,000 – $185,000+) right out of school.
How PrePro Chapters Run: The 3 Core Pillars
The "No Passive Lectures" Rule
We replace long PowerPoint slide decks with hospital morning report: strict 25-minute capped clinician conversations followed by 15-minute diagnostic case huddles where student teams solve patient charts.
The Interactive Role Arcade
Browser-based simulators that let students test-drive real clinical workstations: balancing bypass pump hemodynamics, calculating renal drug clearance, and timing MRI contrast scans.
The 4-Tier Mentorship Network
Linking four generations into a supportive community: Attending Clinicians → Medical Student Fellows → High School Chapter Leaders → Elementary/Middle School Junior Apprentices.
Expanding Hands-On Learning Beyond Medicine
We started with healthcare because clinical care teams have such clear, high-stakes collaborative workflows that high schoolers almost never get to experience. But the core challenge - students being limited to passive lectures instead of active problem solving - exists across every pre-professional pathway.
The same student-centered format we created for medicine - intake, constraint analysis, team problem-solving, and debriefing - can easily expand into chapters for PrePro Law & Public Policy, PrePro Engineering & Technology, and PrePro Business & Finance.