I am currently in my second semester of nursing school here at Southern Miss, and I loving every minute of it! It has already been such a rewarding experience, and I feel like even as a student, I have been able to help so many different patients with their care. Over the past 2 years, I would normally volunteer at Southern Pines Animal Shelter, and I absolutely loved it there! This year I really wanted to focus on volunteering within the healthcare world since I am learning as much about it, so I readily jumped at the opportunity to volunteer at Hattiesburg Clinic. Myself and a few of my fellow nursing school friends spent an entire day giving Covid-19 vaccines to around 400 patients! It was an absolutely incredible experience to be able to help the nurses there with all of the vaccines, paperwork, and educating the patients about everything. It was also so rewarding to know that we were helping others and making history by being apart of the Covid-19 vaccine administration! I found out about the need for vaccine administration volunteers from my nursing school professors, but if anyone would like more information about Hattiesburg Clinic in general, there website is hattiesburgclinic.com. Additionally, I know that Forrest General Hospital offers a volunteer program which is available to more than just nursing students. The website is forresthealth.org/careers-volunteers/volunteers/ if anyone is interested in applying for their program!

Another way that I have been volunteering this semester has been through helping out at a doctor’s office in my hometown. Since I am a nursing student, I want to learn as much as possible, so I made contact with some of the staff at Regional Digestive Specialists in Pascagoula, MS, to ask if I could volunteer there for experience. I was able to volunteer and help out in the office whenever it was needed starting this January, and I really enjoyed the office setting! I was allowed to practice taking patient’s blood pressure and even review their medications with them! Also, I helped with organizing, filling, and coping a lot of the paperwork that they have there. I volunteered at this office from early January to around mid-March, on and off, whenever I could find time to travel home. It was just an amazing experience, and I hope to continue volunteering there over the summer as well!

All in all, I thoroughly suggest volunteering in healthcare if you are a nursing student or just have any interest in medicine, for it allows you to get so much experience! I hope to continue serving others in any way possible throughout the rest my time here at USM as a Luckyday Scholar and in my future career as a nurse. If you have any questions about how to volunteer where I did or just about nursing school, I would love to help answer those any way I can! You can reach me by email at julia.n.clark@usm.edu!

-Julia Clark