For senior Prajwal Adhikari, if he did not have access to design programs like Adobe Studios and Procreate on his laptop and iPad, he would not even consider going into art as a career.

Adhikari said he has always been interested in art, but he never considered himself exceptional at drawing or painting. However, when he first took the graphic design class at Blue Valley Northwest, he said he realized how much easier it is to create a clean and organized art piece using technology.

“You’re given a variety of media platforms that you can use to make it, so I can use [Adobe] Photoshop and Illustrator. Typically what I do is I use different programs altogether in my final design, so a design might have things that I made through Photoshop and then through Illustrator, and I just felt you can’t do that in art,” Adhikari said.

Currently, Adhikari said he is interested in studying graphic or communications design in college, with the overall goal of becoming a designer in the sports field. To prepare for his future career, Adhikari has taken Graphic Design One and Two, and he is the sports design editor for the newspaper. Newspaper is where he does art that is most like his future career, such as designing sports posts for Instagram.

“[Newspaper has] given me a really good opportunity to continue practicing my passion for design in a way where I can start showing people and having a bigger audience to view my work kind of like what I want to eventually end up doing in my career,” Adhikari said.

Similarly, senior Siri Gowda has explored her passion for healthcare at school in Medical Club. As the current president of the organization, Gowda leads over 70 members in participating in various medicine-related activities. 

“In Med Club, we have different kinds of events that members can attend to learn more about medicine and further explore their interests to help them in choosing a career,” Gowda said.

Although she has always been interested in the healthcare field, Gowda said using technology at the Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) played a key role in her commitment to studying medicine.   

As a previous student in the Foundations of Medicine and a current student in the Certified Nurse Aide Program, Gowda has access to a variety of medical technologies to supplement her learning. Gowda said she especially enjoyed participating in the medical simulation lab, formally known as Sim Lab, which offers a realistic environment for students to practice their medical skills. 

The Sim Lab is a healthcare simulation space designed to provide immersive learning experiences for learners. With an instructor watching from behind the scenes, healthcare students at CAPS treat manikins, which are full-body patient simulators. 

“There are different kinds of technology in the lab, including a dummy that has all the features to it,” Gowda said. “It cries, it puts out different types of bodily fluids. You can do all kinds of tests on it.”

For Gowda, she said she learned an extensive amount of information about working in the healthcare field by interacting with the manikin technology. Gowda said she was able to draw blood, measure heart rate and blood pressure and monitor respiratory levels. With her findings, Gowda said she was able to conduct further research and make presentations for her classmates as well. 

“Being in the Sim Lab wasn’t just a hands-on experience; it was also an opportunity for me to really understand the results I was getting and the research I was doing,” Gowda said. “From our findings, we used the information we had learned in class to analyze and diagnose our patients.”

Prior to joining the CAPS, Gowda said that medicine had always been one of her passions, but she was unsure of whether she wanted to pursue it as a career. After participating in the Foundations of Medicine and Certified Nurse Aide Program, Gowda said she felt more confident in the choice she would make for her future.

“I’ve always had an interest in medicine, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted it as a career because going to medical school is a huge commitment,” Gowda said. “Going to CAPS and getting hands-on experience in the Sim Lab really helped me figure out what it would be like to work in healthcare.”

For Gowda, her passion for healthcare goes beyond her academic pursuits. Having worked as a certified pharmacy technician at CVS for nearly two years, Gowda said she aims to get as much medical experience as she can before she graduates.

“I just really want to get to know as much as I can about what working in medicine is like so that I am well prepared for college and medical school,” Gowda said. 

Like Gowda, Adhikari also pursues his passion and future career path outside of school. Adhikari said another way he can practice his design abilities is through his t-shirt business, Entropy Apparel. The business is entirely online and the shirts have a more artsy design compared to his “Game Day Graphics,” according to Adhikari. 

“I just found it as a great way for me to just continue pushing my type of content out there and being able to have a make things that I like making and then even like getting profit out of it as well,” Adhikari said.

 To create his content, Adhikari uses Procreate on his iPad, a drawing app, and the Adobe Suite on his school-issued laptop. According to Adhikari, Adobe Photoshop is his most used, but he also utilizes Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.

The first step in the designing process for Adhikari is looking for inspiration online, he said he usually goes to Pinterest first. However, Adhikari said originality is extremely important and something he needs to keep in mind while browsing design ideas online. To combat this, he said he makes sure not to dig too deeply into online designs.

The next step in his process is using Procreate to sketch out some design ideas. When Adhikari is satisfied with that rough draft, he uploads what he made on Procreate onto whatever Adobe software he is using. Then, he can use what he drew on Procreate as a reference. According to Adhikari, sometimes he just copies what he did on Procreate or changes the design completely.

“It kind of just depends. I just start messing around and just do things how I like and how I think it looks,” Adhikari said.

Another member of the newspaper staff, senior Lane Fetters, also uses technology on an everyday basis to explore her passion for photography. As a photographer, Fetters utilizes a camera to capture various moments that encapsulate daily life for many of her fellow Huskies. 

“I always look at the world as ‘How can I picture that? How can I make that look as good as possible for other people to view?’,” Fetters said. 

Fetters said that her love for photography began when she was in sixth grade after she was inspired by her friend’s mom who was a professional photographer. According to Fetters, she has been taking photos ever since. For Fetters, taking high-quality photos would not be possible without technology. She said she depends on both the help of cameras and editing tools, such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, to capture the best photos she can. 

Ultimately, Fetters said that technology plays a key role in how she is able to achieve her goal of sharing meaningful photos with the world. Although she is unsure of whether she wants to go into photography as a career, Fetters said that having access to cameras and editing technology has given her an opportunity to learn more about her interests. 

“[Technology] gives everyone the option to branch out and try things they otherwise wouldn’t think about trying because they have access to technology and the Internet,” Fetters said. “They can even learn about other things about what they’re interested in. It’s just a really beneficial tool.”