More than 150 high school students from Columbus and Lowndes County spent Tuesday talking with instructors and students at East Mississippi Community College’s Mayhew campus about the possible career paths they could take in their futures.
Some students tried their hands at welding. Others chatted with EMCC’s cosmetology students while dressing each other’s hair. Others watched as EMS students demonstrated CPR.
The students, who came from public and private schools throughout the Golden Triangle, were broken into clusters and shown around different classrooms on the campus.
The program was part of EMCC’s “Lucky Like a Lion” program designed to introduce students to a variety of career opportunities, with particular emphasis on non-traditional career choices for each gender. This was the second year that EMCC has put on such an event for high school students, according to Susan Baird, assistant dean of EMCC’s Manufacturing Technology & Engineering Division.
With events like job fairs, Baird said, students tend to only gravitate toward the fields that they already think they are interested in or that they think they should pursue. In particular, girls tended to gather around traditional careers, like nursing, while boys were drawn to manufacturing. The career clusters are designed to show students a little bit of everything, Baird said.
In other words, the same boys who got 25 minutes in the industrial maintenance lab also spent 25 minutes learning about the nursing program. Meanwhile, the girls who spent 20 minutes with members of EMCC’s culinary program also spent 20 minutes learning about the forestry program.
However, each student was also placed in a cluster that would visit the program which the student’s counselor said the student showed particular talent or interest in, Baird said. This way the students learned more about a field they were thinking about, but also got to see their other options.
The program was paid for by a $5,000 federal grant awarded to community colleges for programs that promote students in nontraditional careers, Baird said. EMCC started the program with the annual Women in Science & Technology Conference, which was combined with Lucky Like a Lion this year.
“There are so many careers or jobs available for advanced manufacturing,” Baird said. “They’re good paying jobs regardless of gender.”
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