Alberta high school students can explore health care through hospital volunteering from age 15, school-organised Discovery Days, and health science competitions. Here is how to get started with each.
The one that puts you inside a hospital
Alberta Health Services youth volunteering is the only route on this page that puts you in a clinical building on a regular schedule. You have to be 15, you apply through your local facility rather than through a provincial form, and placements run a semester or a year. Placements exist in the South Zone as well as the cities, so students in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat can apply close to home.
Apply early and apply to your nearest site. Intake is ongoing, so what limits you is how many placements your facility has.
A day on a medical campus
Discovery Days in Health Sciences, run by the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, is a single day of hands-on health-science workshops and career panels with practising clinicians, held at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary. Your school registers, roughly six weeks ahead, so ask in September whether yours is going.
The competitions you can enter without leaving your school
All three are decided by your score, and you can enter them from any school.
- HOSA Canada is the largest of them: about thirty events, from medical terminology to veterinary science to medical law, with the top three in each earning a place at the International Leadership Conference. It runs through school chapters, so if your school does not have one, starting it takes five registered students, a student president and a teacher advisor. The 2027 Student Leadership Conference is in Toronto, March 1–3, and registration closes January 21, 2027.
- The Brain Bee holds regional neuroscience competitions in both Calgary and Edmonton. Winners advance to the national round, where the questions move from recall to analysing brain tissue and patient diagnoses, and the top finishers represent Canada internationally. It is one day, and the preparation is self-directed.
- The Canadian Biology Olympiad is written online in early April, is aimed at Grades 11 and 12, and leads to a training camp at UBC Okanagan for those selected. It is the qualifying route toward Canada's International Biology Olympiad team, and it is self-study, which means it is available to you whatever your school offers.
The paid research route
Alberta's paid health research placements (the HYRS program and the campuses that run it) take Grade 11 students with at least 85% in Math 20, Biology 20 and one more science, and which campus you apply to is decided by where you live. Research programs for Alberta students covers the geography rule, the marks, and the March deadlines.
If you are in Grade 10: HYRS is a Grade 11 program, and the science courses it requires have to be on your Grade 11 timetable.
Be careful with the ones you pay for
There is a market in summer medical programs that charge tuition, and some of them are excellent. Med YSP at the University of Toronto runs week-long modules in human physiology and microbiology with real labs, and it costs about $1,700 per module. The university has postponed it to Summer 2027.
Judge a program by what you can show for it afterwards, whatever it costs. A paid course teaches you material; a volunteer placement or a research assistantship puts you somewhere a person can later write a letter about.
What to do this month
If you are 15 or older, the AHS application is the thing to start today, because it has no deadline to wait for. Then ask a science teacher two questions: whether the school has ever registered for Discovery Days, and whether anyone has looked at starting a HOSA chapter.
The full list, with what each one takes and who runs it, is on the health and medicine programs page. Awards that reward this kind of work sit in our STEM scholarships list, and Build my combo narrows both lists to your grade and region.