Get Future Ready: Freshmen Career Day
The most common question you are probably going to be asked in high school: What do you want to do when you grow up? Luckily for the freshmen, they have another three years to decide, but it’s never too soon to start thinking.
For the past five years at James Buchanan, there is a day devoted to the ninth graders to learn about their different options after high school. This day is known as Career Day and it will be taking place on Tuesday, Feb. 20 this year.
“Career Day is an opportunity for all the ninth graders to be exposed to people in our area to ask questions to them about their careers,” said Mrs.Chris Shelley (Faculty) who is in charge of planning Career Day.
Before the event, freshmen have to complete a paper telling Shelley which career clusters they are interested in. They only hear from three different clusters, so what they choose is important. Each student does a list of their top five choices because sometimes some fields are more popular than others.
This day is organized into sixteen different panels each representing one of the sixteen different career clusters. Each panel is thirty minutes long and during that time freshmen are able to ask as many questions as they would like. There are two to four different speakers in each panel that are part of the same cluster, but they do not necessarily do the same job or work at the same place.
“For example in the Health Science Cluster I would have maybe a nurse and then somebody who is a receptionist,” said Shelley.
Both of those careers are in the same career cluster but are completely different jobs with different work environments.
“This is a way to expose kids to a whole variety of different careers,” said Shelley “As well as different businesses in the area.”
Having a variety of people from different careers also lets the students see what careers are available to them with or without a college level degree. Everyone person in the panels could be from a different educational level some could be right out of high school and some could have been in college for eight years to earn their degree.
Each group of speakers will have a student ambassador with them to introduce them to the ninth graders and kick off the questions. The student ambassador will ask starter questions to give the students some ideas on other questions that they might have on the careers.
“Think of questions in advance,” said Shelley when asked what advice she might have for the students coming to Career Day.
Sometimes it is not always easy to come up with questions on the spot, if you have a question with you it will get the conversation flowing quickly. The questions you bring with you may even spark a question in someone else that you may not have thought of. Career Day is to be a day of learning and thinking about the future to get the students to be able to answer the question: What do you want to do when you grow up?
Hannah Myers is in her second year as a member of the James Buchanan Student Media staff. She is a senior and an editor JBSM. She is employed at Lizzy's...
