As he observed from a few rows back, senior Noel Augustine took notes on how the professional finished a procedure on a patient.

But this wasn’t for volunteer hours or for a class: Noel was shadowing interventional radiologists and neurologists at Medical City Plano, a full-service hospital and trauma center, this summer for his senior project.

“I observed doctors as they performed procedures on patients, such as doing angiograms, looking at strokes, and looking at patients coming into the emergency room that needed care right away,” Noel said.

He worked from July to mid-August almost every day for three hours per day.

“I have always been interested in the medical field,” Noel said. “Ever since I was little, [my parents have] been able to take me to any meetings they had, and when I volunteered at [Medical City Plano] several summers ago, I really enjoyed working with all the patients and interacting with them, and all the different types of occupations involved.”

Going into the medical field is a tradition in Augustine’s family. His dad is a respiratory therapist, his mom is a nurse and his older sister, Neethu, shadowed a pulmonologist for her senior project, which is where he got the idea for his senior project.

“I’m excited that my brother has similar interests in the medical field as I do, but I know that he has his own reasons for wanting to pursue medicine as a career,” Neethu said. “I’m glad that he decided to use his senior project to explore his passions and adapt the project to his specific interests in medicine.”

The medical field, and healthcare as a whole, supply millions of jobs for the economy. There are jobs in therapy, surgery, nursing, pediatrics, technologists, technicians, and more. But nothing appealed to Noel like medicine did. Shadowing encouraged Noel’s interest to enter the medical field.

“[Shadowing] gives me a bigger, greater, better idea of what I want to do,” Noel said. “I always wanted to work in medicine, but I was never sure where. Observing in the interventional field let me know that I wanted to not just sit behind a screen and look at images, and I didn’t want to do whole big surgeries. I would rather do small procedures and take care of interventional care that is just really important and new in the field of medicine.”