With College2Career Forums, Students Go Hands-On With Careers From Forensic Science to Welding

We sat down with GEAR UP for MY SUCCESS’s Melissa Smith and GEAR UP for the FUTURE’s William Markham to ask them about their experience planning the K20 Center’s College2Career Forums. These forums give students the opportunity to visit real-world career settings to see and work with professionals on the job, connecting students with new career pathways through hands-on learning experiences.

Melissa Smith

My most recent College2Career Forum was on January 26 at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. We explored the Occupational Safety and Health Department.

William Markham

Mine was on February 15th at Metro Tech South Bryant campus, where we explored welding and other programs. Metro Tech is a technical school. We chose it because it’s close to the students and highlights a program they were most interested in at the tech campus connected with their high school. It’s targeted toward students to help them see whether they want to go to a four-year school, two-year school, or technical school. Welding is one of the programs they wanted to highlight.

Melissa Smith

I serve rural schools, and they’re very spread out. I target tech schools, colleges, universities, and businesses that are closer to the schools’ locations so students don’t have to travel as far. I met with two department chairs last summer and planned four different forums at Durant at the southeastern campus.

I have 24 schools that are scattered from Idabel to Guymon with one school down at Frederick. I am all over Oklahoma—I go to them. I map everything out first for these events—how far is this institution from this school? What time would they have to leave in the morning? What time would they have to get back on the bus in the afternoon? How far are they willing to travel? There are a lot of conversations before we can even start deciding what programs to look at.

Melissa Smith

Absolutely. We’ve taken students to forums and campus visits as well. We’ve taken students who live right on the border of Oklahoma and Arkansas to the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith. Some had never been out of state, but they lived right there on the state line. Because of what we do, they get to experience those things.

Melissa Smith

Definitely in the career fields. One of the things the students got to do at this particular forum was use fire extinguishers. Every single student got to extinguish a fire. And that was something that I don’t think any of them had done before. That kind of hands-on experience is our goal with College2Career Forums.

William Markham

Yes. Welding is not a career that you get a lot of hands-on experience with outside of a shop class. We had one student whose face lit up once we got there because welding is something that he wants to do. He actually got to see it and hold some equipment and torch his own initials into a piece of metal. He was asking all the welding students questions. He was already engaged, so once he got to experience what that career would be like, it opened his mind to all the things that he could do after high school.

It’s always good to see the light bulb come on for students in 10th and 11th grade. There are so many careers out there. There are so many things you can do. Do you want to stay home? Do you want to go far away? What do you want to do? I mean, that’s the question they’re asked daily. And they often don’t know because, as high-schoolers, that’s so far away in their minds. For us to be able to take them somewhere meaningful—hopefully they discover something they didn’t know they were interested in, or even realize what they’re doing isn’t something they want to do when they get out of high school. I think that’s equally important because they get to have some real experience with certain careers without investing a lot of time and money. When they experience it as a high-schooler, it helps shape their decisions.

Melissa Smith

We ask students after the trip whether the information in the forum was useful. And one student we talked to said, very clearly, it was not for her. In conversation with her, we found the forum was still useful because she could mark that option off her list.

I think I saw that the most when we went to UCO’s Forensic Science Institute. Students got to hear exactly what forensic scientists do. It’s not what you see on TV. It’s not like Criminal Minds or NCIS. And one of the students said, ‘Okay, I was super into this before, but now I’m a little more hesitant. I don’t know if I could actually do everything involved in forensic science.’

Melissa Smith

We had three rotations and one of them was a DUI simulation. We were talking about Occupational Safety. And hearing some of the things that the students talked about after wearing the DUI simulation goggles, hearing the side conversations, students talked about feeling that level of inebriation. Just some eye-opening conversations and reactions.

William Markham

Yes. What’s nice about some of these visits is sometimes they turn into other experiences. For example, at that welding visit, we had fewer students come than we expected, so we finished the welding activity faster. To fill in time, we got to explore other parts of the campus, notably one of the automotive technician areas. One student who wasn’t as engaged in welding lit up once we got into that other tech. He was like, ‘That’s what I wanna do’. It wasn’t the most meaningful experience for welding for him, but because we had extra time, he was able to see another career offered at that campus. And it’s something that he wants to do.

To go back to why we chose the location, those students get free admission and free tuition up until a year or two after they graduate high school. It gives them another alternative outside of just the traditional four-year or community college. They can go somewhere local that won’t cost them any money.

Melissa Smith

I’m working on a visit for the Guymon fire department. So it’s not just visits to schools.

William Markham

Yeah, it doesn’t have to necessarily be a postsecondary institution. I’m looking into Medicine Park’s wildlife refuge.

Melissa Smith

I’ve also worked with the game wardens from the Oklahoma Wildlife Department. It varies.

William Markham

The structure depends on the professionals and the organization that we’re working with. Generally, the main goal is to get as much hands-on experience and activities as possible. That way it’s engaging with the students. Sometimes they do a lecture in the beginning of the visit, and then they move into hands-on to get them in the action, learning on the job so they can see what a normal day would be like for them or different experiences they would have in that career. There’s not enough time to do real training, but the students see enough of the surface level to make a more informed decision in the future.

Melissa Smith

Per profession, when I meet with those stakeholders or those partners, it’s hard to know what to expect because I don’t know their profession. I don’t know what they can and can’t do for us. I don’t know if they have enough fire extinguishers for all of us or whatever their expertise might be. I tell them examples of what other institutions have done or what other professionals have done. It’s usually up to them, and they plan it in most cases. What we typically do is handle our schools, their transportation, lunch, and T-shirts, but usually the content comes from the stakeholder.

Melissa Smith

I mean, what do you have to lose?

William Markham

You’ll experience something that you possibly wouldn’t get to experience otherwise.

Melissa Smith

One of the things that I always tell students when I introduce myself—I tell them when I was their age, I saw what my parents did for a living, I saw what the school personnel that I was around did for a living, and I saw the dentist and the doctor. How did I know that I didn’t want to be an architect if I had never heard that word before? So my job, our job, is to expose them to as many career fields as possible, just to see.

Melissa Smith

I remember a young lady from Stratford High School who wants to be an equine chiropractor. She’s dead set. She said it’s all she’s ever wanted to be since she was a little kid. I remember her coming to a forum at Murray State in Tishomingo, and she was super excited about the vet tech program because it was a way that she could get started in veterinary medicine. It’s not her dream to be a vet tech, but to be around the animals and to be in that field—it’s much closer than she would normally get.

William Markham

Last spring, we took a group from one of our schools in Lawton to the Sam Noble Museum. They got to experience behind the scenes what it’s like to run a museum, all the different careers, paleontology, all the different sciences that they have at Sam Noble. A couple of weeks after the event, there was a card on my desk from the school counselor, and all the kids signed it. They wrote a little note about how great the experience was and that if it wasn’t for GEAR UP, they wouldn’t have had that opportunity to experience those careers.

Melissa Smith

I have one particular counselor at a very small school. She usually just drives a car with several kids that she’ll bring with her. I tend to hear about the conversation in the car after and how informed they are, how excited they were.

Melissa Smith

If you’re interested in hosting a group of students who you want to go into your profession later, you can contact us!

William Markham

For teachers: it doesn’t take a whole lot to reach out to a local business or a local community partner and say, “Hey, I’ve got a group of interested students. Can we come by for a couple of hours?” When you have the resource that GEAR UP is, it’s easy for us to do that. It’s what we’re here for. But it’s super simple for anyone to be able to do it on their own. We hope, once we’re out of these schools, they will have seen this process and will be able to make it their own and continue to give their students meaningful experiences.