The Garden City Telegram
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Formula for success: Middle school girls explore career fields
Published 12/3/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
It took a little bit of math to make sense of the "tickets to success" held in the hands of a couple hundred seventh-grade girls Tuesday afternoon:
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Laurie Sisk/Telegram — Faviola Chairez, Kenneth Henderson Middle School, left and Christy Guebara, Deerfield Middle School, learn about testing for acids and bases during the Fire Science section sponsored by the Garden City Community College Fire Science program.
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Laurie Sisk/Telegram — Miranda Morales, Kenneth Henderson Middle School, dissects an owl pellet to discover what an owl has eaten during the zoology section sponsored by the Lee Richardson Zoo.
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Laurie Sisk/Telegram — Kenneth Henderson Middle Schoolers Alisa Bordewick, left and Molly Petersen learn about the properties of hot air using a blow dryer during the aviation section.
Success = I + A³
The "I" was for "interests."
"You want to tap into what you're really interested in," Judy Crymble, Garden City Community College's dean of technical education, told the students attending the Girls in Engineering, Math and Science (GEMS) career fair held at St. Dominic Parish Center.
The fair allowed the girls to explore 20 different career fields connected to engineering, science and math, including everything from aviation to zoology, through hands-on presentations from people -- mostly women -- who work in those careers daily. Seventh-grade girls from Garden City, Holcomb, Deerfield and Healy, along with a few involved in home schooling, attended the event. A similar career fair for seventh-grade boys is set for today.
Crymble encouraged the girls to explore their interests in the fields under discussion, even though the jobs are largely dominated by men. For instance, according to the National Science Foundation, 16.9 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering awarded in 2001 were given to women.
A bachelor's degree in that field will be awarded in about two weeks to Ana Lazarin, a Wichita State University student who moved from Mexico to Ulysses at age 13 with no English skills. The first in her family to earn a high school diploma, Lazarin said she made it her goal to pursue her interest in engineering.
Lazarin said she also had aptitude in the subjects that form the basis of engineering -- math and science. "Aptitude" is another part of the formula for success -- one of the "A's" in the "A" to the third power.
"If you take your interest, and you have a natural ability, that's a good connection," Crymble said.
The second "A" was for "attitude" -- a positive attitude with energy, spirit and an interest in working hard, Crymble told the girls.
Lazarin said she had dreams when her family brought her to the United States for better opportunities of becoming a U.S. resident and earning a college degree. Yet at the start of high school, she lost a bit of that motivation and positive attitude.
"I was falling behind," she said. "I took easy classes, the least science possible."
Therefore, by her junior year, when she decided she wanted to pursue engineering, she had a lot of catching up to do, especially in science and math, in order to make it to Garden City Community College for an associate's degree program.
"I do not advise you to do what I did," she said of her choice to avoid a more challenging start to high school.
Counselors and programs through the Kansas State Department of Education try to prevent situations like the one Lazarin found herself in when she began her junior year. At USD 457, for instance, seventh-graders are getting started on their seven-year plans designed to carry them through high school and beyond.
The state department recently has begun encouraging career exploration even earlier than middle school, suggesting the discussions start at the elementary age, according to information presented to the USD 457 Board of Education recently by Deb Jarmer, coordinator for career and technical education. By eighth grade, Kansas students are supposed to have laid out a career plan of study, aided by a computer program called the Kansas Career Pipeline. The program includes interest surveys and place where students can develop portfolios.
It all helps with the third "A" in the formula for success -- "Ability."
"How do you become able?" Crymble asked. "You practice and learn and go to school."
To become able in athletic training, for example, one has to attend an accredited program and learn about subjects like anatomy and physiology, GCCC Assistant Athletic Director Greg Greathouse told girls who attended his workshop -- but not before demonstrating to them some of the tools of the trade, like a device that can "bypass the brain" by stimulating muscles with small doses of electrical current.
The aviation workshop presented by Rachelle Powell, aviation director at Garden City Regional Airport, gave students some hands-on experience, too.
They tried tricks like keeping a pingpong ball floating in midair above the air produced by a hair dryer. It stayed afloat thanks to Bernoulli's principle, she said, which helps explain why airplanes fly. The air flows evenly around each side of the ball, and though gravity is pulling downward, pressure from the air below the ball is pushing upward at an equal force, keeping it in midair.
One doesn't have to be an expert on Bernoulli's principle, though, to work at the airport. She said everyone from nurses to lawyers can be involved in aviation in some way.
"Pretty much anything you can think of in careers, you can do it at the airport," Powell said.
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