Summer at the West Virginia University Health Sciences Center looks different from the traditional image of empty classrooms and laboratories.
Young people from across West Virginia come to Morgantown for hands-on learning. They use equipment, practice skills, solve problems and ask questions of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, scientists and other health professionals. Working shoulder to shoulder with our faculty and staff, they get a glimpse of what it actually feels like to be part of these professions.
That experience matters. Hearing someone describe a career in healthcare is one thing. Trying it with your own hands, beside someone who does the work every day, is something different. For some students, a summer program confirms an interest. For others, it opens a door they did not know was there.
That is part of our mission at West Virginia University: to open doors for the people of our state.
Nicholas Baker, M.D., is a wonderful example.
Nick grew up in Iaeger, in McDowell County. When he talks about the choices in front of him as a young man, he puts it simply – either driving a coal truck or going to college.
His mother encouraged him to go to college. In high school, he joined the Health Sciences and Technology Academy, or HSTA, a statewide WVU program that helps West Virginia students prepare for college and careers in health and science.
Through HSTA, Nick did research and came to Morgantown for summer programs, affirming that college was the right choice for him to complement his mother’s encouragement.
"It gave me access to opportunities I never had in McDowell County," he said.
He graduated from the WVU School of Medicine and trained in Charleston, Pittsburgh and New York. He spent more than a decade at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directed robotic thoracic surgery.
Then he came home.
Nick joined WVU in 2024, and one of the first things he did was find HSTA again.
In July 2025, Nick brought HSTA seniors into our WV STEPS simulation center. He showed them the da Vinci surgical robot, the same technology he uses to operate on patients with lung and esophageal cancer, and then let them sit at the controls and try it themselves.
Those students came from communities across West Virginia, including towns like Iaeger. They were learning from a surgeon who had once been an HSTA student himself.
The student became the teacher. The word "doctor" comes from the Latin word for "teacher."
"That was an awesome feeling, being full circle," Nick said. "You don't have to come from a background of physicians or have a huge launch pad of support from your family," he said.
Nick's story shows what can happen when a young person encounters the right experience, encouragement and mentor at the right time.
Our students need classrooms, books, science and increasingly sophisticated technology. But these are not professions learned only by reading about them. We learn by doing: watching people with experience, working beside them, trying things ourselves, receiving feedback and gradually developing judgment. Then we pass those skills on to others.
We also learn what is hard to capture in a lecture: how professionals work together, respond when the answer is uncertain and bring compassion to the people who trust them.
That apprenticeship becomes central in training healthcare professionals, but the first spark can come much earlier. A summer program may last only a few days. A simulation may last a few minutes. A conversation with a faculty member may be shorter still. Yet sometimes that experience changes the question from, "What does that person do?" to "Could I do that?"
For Nick, the answer was yes.
Improving the health of West Virginia is not only about the care we provide today. It is also about preparing the people who will carry that care forward. Many of them are in middle schools and high schools across our state right now.
Every summer, we have the chance to open a door for another young person. Nick walked through one of those doors. Now he is back, holding it open for the next student.