Albuquerque Public Schools
Surgeons Inspire Young Minds at Bel-Air Elementary
Robot-naming contest leads to visit and career advice for first graders.
It’s not every day that first graders get to hang out with surgeons, but that’s exactly what Heather Hunt’s class at Bel-Air Elementary School got to do on Wednesday after winning a robot naming competition held by Lovelace Women’s Hospital.
General surgeons Mario Leyba and Michael Blea talked to students about their jobs and gave them pizza and T-shirts adorned with “We named the robot!” to mark the occasion.
Inspired by a 2008 Disney animated film about a robot on an uninhabitable Earth in the distant future, first grader Mae Mitchell proposed “Walle” for the hospital’s daVinci5 surgical robot.
She drew a round of applause from her classmates for coming up with the winning name.
Blea, who attended Corrales Elementary School, said Tuesday’s visit to Bel-Air was special to him. A similar visit from a University of New Mexico surgeon to his middle school inspired Blea to begin thinking about a career in medicine.
“This is kind of full circle,” he said.
Students were brimming with excitement on Wednesday as colorful balloons added to the festive atmosphere.
“We’re both surgeons who operate with a robot,” Dr. Blea told the students.
“We fix broken things sometimes that need to be fixed in people’s bodies, that’s what surgery is,” Dr. Leyba added.
Hunter, a first-grader in a burgundy sports coat, was equally impressed with the doctors' attire as he was with their medical acumen.
“I kind of look like you guys,” he said, pointing to the sports coats the doctors wore.
To which Principal Hannah Mainolfa remarked, “You already have the outfit, now you can be a doctor.”
One girl in the class asked if the hospital had other robots.
Blea said the hospital has three other robots like Walle, including one named Rodoc by students at Seven Bar Elementary.
Asked how they became doctors, they quipped that they had to eat a lot of pizza.
“You’ve got to do your homework, and you have to listen to your mom and dad and family, OK, and you need to get good friends to help each other, alright,” Leyba said. “You have to go to college, and you have to do more school.”
“If you want to be a doctor, you can be a doctor. You’ve got to try hard and do all those things we talked about,” Leyba said. “So don’t give up. You can do it.”
He added that even if they don’t want to become doctors, there are many other jobs in medicine.
“There are nurses and people who help with the robot and people who put people to sleep and people who take care of little kids.”