Today I went to College Community School District to see their Career Day. It was held at the high school, and it was organized by WLC, (Workplace Learning Connection), which is an organization that schools pay to connect them to career experiences and opportunities (and internships).
This was highly organized and well done. The speakers I went to were:
Department of Anesthesia, UIHC
Pam Jacobs, RN, BSN, CCRC
Clinical Research Coordinator
This one was a nurse who works in research. She loved her job, and presented by giving students pre-written questions which she had brought with her. These were numbered. She asked each student to give their name before asking the question, and she said, "Nice to meet you, __________" before answering. She did this because she didn't find public speaking to be an easy thing to do and found this tool beneficial to her speaking style. It worked well, and involved the students in a non-threatening manner.
UNI
Dr. Chad Heinzel
Geologist and Professor
This professor had put together an activity to involve the students. He divided up groups and each group had a set of questions and a 'role' they were to be in to answer the question. The group that I sat with was to answer the questions from the role of the government, and the questions had to do with the supply and production of petroleum. It was interesting that the kids didn't really understand the supply and demand of oil in the United States, nor the role the government would have in decisions affecting it. They were asked how the government my use scientists in this role. They were guided to the idea that research was needed in finding other resources since oil's supply was lower than its demand in the United States.
My Chiro
Bruce Weisbein
Chiropractor/Owner
This chiropractor used a lecture style to tell the students about his career path and his job as a chiropractor. He had some guiding questions he used from WLC, such as, "What personality traits are needed for this job?". He did a good job explaining his job, but didn't get a lot of interaction out of the kids. He handed out a business card, which I was wondering about (our school just had a big to-do about advertising in school).
Clipper
Mike Cavanaugh
Manufacturing Engineer
This man had quite the business background. He used the overhead (or a computer..I didn't notice which) to put his work experience up on the screen. He had worked in at least 10 different places, and made it clear that with a science/technology/engineering degree he was marketable in many kinds of businesses. He did a good job of showing that people who like to work hands-on with machines have many kinds of opportunities, and he went to Kirkwood, which gave career day a nice well-rounded kind of educational opportunity portrayal.
I stayed till just after noon and felt that I had a good sample of Career Day so I went back to the office to catch up on my STEM activities.
I finished proofreading the toolkits "Living Things" and "Measuring Time" yesterday and met with Val to go over my corrections, which I had printed out for her so that she could easily find what I was correcting. There was only one broken link and the Iowa Core was the only one that needed to be more specific, except for Mediagraphies, which links to a link. Val said that it needed to do that or it times out. The vocabulary was one of the main places where format was not uniform. Some were capitalized lists, some were not, some were bulleted, some said that there was no vocabulary and some said that this was the vocabulary, but then had a blank (because there wasn't any). So we made that uniform. I made a lot of grammar and spelling corrections, mostly subject/verb agreements.
Today I went through all of the TIR files for the handouts, agenda and information needed for the Nov.4 meeting with the new grant recipients. There is a lot of stuff there, including speakers, a Power Point, handouts, forms, agenda....assessments for pre and post data collection, and more. My head is spinning. I e-mailed Jim and asked him if he had time to meet tomorrow. My chances of him being able to are probably not high, but I have no time to waste in getting ready. I didn't really realize I had to organize this, so I'm trying to get right on it.
Jeanne and Erica, you have been awesome, and I want to thank you for your guidance, patience and faith in me. I'm trying my hardest to make the most of this wonderful experience. I feel blessed to be here, and I'll do everything I can to give it all I have.
