Historian: Pragnya Akula

Coppell High School junior Pragnya Akula has been elected as Healthcare Occupations Students of America historian for the 2023-24 school year. This is Akula’s first position in the club.

What are the roles of the historian?

I document all the things that we have done and take pictures. I also would create a scrapbook or something that collects all the memories we have made over the past year.

When did it first occur to you to run for historian?

When I was a freshman and a sophomore, I felt that there were not a lot of opportunities to expand my passions in healthcare. There was a focus on competition, which is a really cool thing, but there weren’t as many opportunities to focus on the community and empathy. I wanted to create more opportunities for our future healthcare professionals, so that we become more well rounded both academically and emotionally so that we can help in a healthcare setting.

What about healthcare interests you?

I love being able to help people. People have an intrinsic love for helping other people, and I love that people go out of their way to go through all these years in med school just so that they can get the opportunity to help people.

Where do you see yourself going in the healthcare field?

I would love to do prosthetic design. There is something about technology in the healthcare field that really interests me; I love how there’s all these new innovations that advance medicine and make it more accessible.

What about the role of historian interests you?

I have a passion for photography and creating, and as historian I would be able to capture all these moments in HOSA both big and small so that people could look back at them and remember all the amazing things that we accomplished. I love being able to be a part of that.

How do you try to combine your passion for photography with healthcare?

Photography has a lot to do with awareness. When you take pictures, you create art and it helps people understand where you’re coming from. If you’re trying to explain something, a picture or an image really helps people understand and form an emotional attachment.

What is something you admire about the current leadership?

They are very hard working. There are so many opportunities we got this year that we didn’t get to see last year. There’s a lot of networking with people that know what they’re doing and there are a lot of instagram posts. All of it is in order to make our HOSA better.

How do you want to build on that in the coming year?

I want us to have more community networking. I want us to be able to go to different hospitals and animal shelters so that we can see how we can not only help our school but also the community around us.

What are some aspects of your health science classes that you enjoy?

In Mr. Borowski’s Health Science Theory class, there is a lot of community service, he really emphasizes how important it is to care about other people. More so than the actual knowledge and how scientific you need to be he cares a lot about ‘are you a good person, are you caring about others interests?’ In Mrs. Deinhammer’s Anatomy and Physiology class, I love that you learn a lot about health science, but you also learn how to take initiative in your own learning. She allows you to incorporate your own interests into whatever you’re creating, previously when we worked on the cardiovascular system she had us create any kind of content that pertained to what we were learning and with my passion in photography and videography I was able to create an animated video about it.

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