A Booth for the Youth -- High School Career Fair

Last week I got the opportunity to man a booth at a career expo for local high school students. First of all, how come they never had these when I was a kid? Maybe they did and they just weren't on my radar. The concept is extremely cool. It's like "science fair" meets "career day". People from all kinds of local companies and organizations are invited representing a huge spectrum of careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Each of us presenters get a big table where we can set up displays with pictures and props representing our careers. Then we just stood there for 3 hours and let the kids and their parents wander up to us and ask us questions about ourselves, our career, and how we got there. Over 600 people attended. It was just plain fun.

In preparation for doing this I used my secret weapon for generating awesome ideas: Google. I typed in "high school career booth." I only got one hit that made any sense at all, someone asking the web-verse for advice on how to do a good one. The consensus? Candy. Ply your audience with sugar. Since I was already volunteering my time, I wasn't too enthused about also volunteering my money to give kids cavities, so I skipped that tip.



Instead I brought some handouts. I found a really nice publicly available brochure on the web put out by a professional society on careers in ecology (at first I was planning on drafting something myself, but when I found this excellent one already written to target high school kids, I decided there was no need to reinvent the wheel). I also made up one with some good websites students could go to for more information, including internship opportunities at my company.

And I raided our stash of materials from our last public open house. We had a lovely giant poster with lots of pictures about soil's role in affecting global warming, as well as a bunch of nice laminated pages we could set out on the table to point to with interesting diagrams explaining concepts or images of how we take measurements in the field. I also brought a soil corer and some other props from around the lab -- a sieve, basin, some dry soil from the field, and also some soil I'd separated using one of our procedures that people could touch and examine. Last but not least I put together a powerpoint slide show of images of our group at work, in the field, lab, and office.

Having a variety of things that people could point at and ask questions about worked really well for starting a conversation. It certainly made it more fun for me, because I never had the same conversation twice, even though I talked about the same themes. I was a little mixed about the benefits of the laptop slide show. At first no one was really looking at it. But as the night went on, I think people grew a little tired and appreciated being able to just look at it rather than asking lots of questions. Also very beneficial -- bringing along a colleague/friend. It's easier to escape to the bathroom or grab a water as needed, and plus we learned a bit from each other as we took turns explaining different things.

What made the whole experience fun, though, was the kids. Because of the whole booth set-up, they came up to you if they were actually interested in what you had to say, and they asked great questions. I felt like it was a very rewarding and worthwhile experience, because I think it helps demystify for youth what it means to go into science and technology. There are a lot of options beyond the stereotypical white labcoat and tie. For example, you could be an ecologist and wear jeans to work (Cool!). And there is such an array of different disciplines there's bound to be something that interests you, whether it be soil or something completely weird and "out there" like, I don't know, medicine? To each their own, I guess.