At the Bancorp South Arena in Tupelo Tuesday, New Hope Middle School eighth grader Grace Massey performed surgery.
Or rather, she used surgical tools to remove tootsie rolls from a hospital dummy at an interactive booth set up by Magnolia Regional Health Center. Then she and some friends talked to trauma specialists and other medical professionals from North Mississippi Medical Center before trying their hands at CPR on dummies.
“This is really cool,” said Massey, who wants to be a doctor when she grows up. “It’s interesting to see what other people do.”
It was the first day of CREATE Foundation’s “Imagine the Possibilities” career expo for eighth graders from 17 counties in north Mississippi. The event included interactive booths from more than 130 businesses in 16 career pathways, from engineering to marketing and finance.
The event lasts three days and will give more than 3,000 students the chance to explore including students in Lowndes and Oktibbeha counties. Eighth graders from Lowndes County School District and Heritage Academy all attended Tuesday. The event is free for the students.
“At this age, in eighth grade, they’re beginning to look at and talk about careers, pathways to where they want to go after high school,” Caledonia Middle School Principal Karen Pittman said. “So this gives them some good ideas and good experience.”
The expo aims to show students the many career options open to them, help them determine where their interests lie and hopefully inspire them to work toward that career.
“It was great because a lot of these kids have never experienced this,” said Celeste Gillis, information, communication, and technology teacher at New Hope Middle School. “They don’t know much about grown up jobs other than what their parents do and what they see on television. So I think it was great that they can actually be exposed to what is out there and available to them other than what they already know. It gives them some goals to shoot for, some aspirations, maybe.”
Determining students’ interests
Career paths are divided into clusters in the arena. CREATE Foundation had provided career and ITC teachers with materials to prepare students for specific clusters and help them determine which they would prefer, Pittman said.
Gillis had her students take a career finder quiz to determine which pathways they were suited for. For the field trip to the expo, she divided the students into groups by pathway. They had two hours to go through the arena, starting with their own clusters before exploring other pathways that caught their interest.
Most of the booths were interactive – if students weren’t performing surgery like Massey, they could climb into the model cockpit of a Boeing 747, try their hand at construction or interior design in the Architecture and Construction cluster, participate in a fashion show set up by Reed’s or try any number of other activities.
Reagan Glenn, an eighth grader from Heritage Academy, has always wanted to be a dentist. There was a booth for that, too.
“I got to see what all the dentists did and put on the mask and gloves,” she said, adding that she’d even put a dental mirror in her friend’s mouth.
Finding new paths
Students found interests outside their chosen career paths as well. Caledonia students Hallie Brewer, Braxton Miller and Hayden Palmer want to be an engineer, a physical therapist and a teacher, respectively. But their favorite thing at the expo was exploring a Walmart delivery truck set up in the Transportation, Distribution and Logistics cluster.
“I didn’t know they had beds in there,” Brewer said.
“They had a microwave in there,” Palmer added.
Gillis was excited at how the day turned out.
“I saw students that said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know that was a job,'” she said. “So I liked to see that. … And then students that don’t always get involved in class, some of my shyer students, more reserved, they were getting hands on (experience) also.”
She plans to have her students research the careers that caught their interest at the expo. They’ll figure out what level of education they’ll need, how much it will cost and ways to meet those costs, either through scholarships or budgeting.
“So many of our kids are so bright and have so much potential and they don’t know how to use that or why they should use that,” Gillis said. “This gives them something to work toward.”
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