"Students looking for careers in health, education or social work will gain a year of valuable experience and networking to help promote their careers or to get into graduate or professional school," said Nancy Schell, CSP supervisor.

AmeriCorps members help provide health education, disease prevention and health-care access programming to underserved residents of Southeastern Ohio. For example, this year AmeriCorps members have helped provide vision, hearing and lice screenings in Athens County schools.

Among the benefits for AmeriCorps personnel are a $9,600 yearly living allowance and an educational award of $4,725. Not to mention travel opportunities such as the spring break trip to Ecuador that AmeriCorps members Lance Holton and Marisa Osorio made March 13 to 25.

Holton and Osorio went as part of OU-COM's Tropical Disease Institute educational/humanitarian workshop in Ecuador. Their trip marked the first time anyone in AmeriCorps participated in an overseas TDI workshop.

Holton, an Ashtabula native who graduated from Ohio University in 2000 with a degree in exercise physiology, gained valuable knowledge of the effects of mosquito-borne diseases that will continue to help him at the AmeriCorps site of the Athens County Health Department's environmental health division.

AmeriCorps "seemed to work perfectly with what I was looking at doing" said Holton, who, like Osorio, is in his second year with AmeriCorps. "I wanted to deal with medicine -- osteopathic medicine. I wanted to work in local schools and health education, and with kids. This year, my site is in environmental health, which was a niche that needed to be filled with the advent of the West Nile virus in Ohio."

The West Nile virus has been an increasingly serious health concern in the United States recently. Outbreaks of the virus, transmitted most commonly to humans by mosquitoes, have gained notoriety stateside in the last three years. In the New York City metropolitan area, nearly 100 cases of encephalitis in humans have been reported since 1999, a handful of them being fatal. In Ecuador, Holton had the opportunity to trap mosquitoes and extract DNA. "He got to practice what he learned here in Athens in an international setting," Schell said.

Osorio's language fluency (she graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., in 1999 with a degree in Spanish) and previous experience shadowing a physician in Honduras was a great benefit for her during the workshop.

"I wanted to have some exposure to other cultures and methods of health care as well as other lifestyles, and I wanted to learn about tropical diseases," Osorio said. "I got everything that I had expected out of the trip."

Holton and Osorio will benefit from their AmeriCorps experiences when they begin medical school this fall. Holton will attend Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine/Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz. Osorio will attend OU-COM.

AmeriCorps has been the perfect springboard for students interested in post-graduate professional careers, especially in the health-care field. In addition to Holton and Osorio, Schell said that almost half of this year's AmeriCorps members are moving on to professional schools next fall, including two who will be pharmacy and optometry students at the Ohio State University and a third who will be attending law school there.

To be eligible for AmeriCorps, individuals must be at least 17 years of age with at least a high school diploma or GED equivalency. Applicants must enjoy working with different types and varying ages of people and should have interest in community, health and education issues. Applicants must have a valid Ohio driver's license and reliable transportation.

Applications can be obtained by e-mailing Schell at schelln@ohio.edu or at the AmeriCorps Web site. Applicants must be available to work by Aug. 12. Schell is also accepting applications at 058 Grosvenor Hall on Ohio University's campus in Athens. For more information, call (740) 593-2293.