Royal Spring Middle School (RSMS) held an inaugural Career Day Friday full of workshops, activities and opportunities to network.
Organized by RSMS Youth Services Coordinator Addison Fry, representatives from the “16 national career clusters” started with Q&As in the morning, Fry said. The broad spectrum of careers provided variety for the students to sample.
“Our main goal was to showcase each one and provide someone from the community to speak about talking points such as, ‘How did you get here? What was required of you to get here? What are some skills and interests that led you here?’” she said. “We have a very diverse population of students, so we wanted to make sure that we had stuff that took six years of medical school but also that they could walk away from high school and go and sign up and be an electrician and do a trade.”
After lunch, the eighth graders workshoped with the career representatives, Fry said. RSMS surveyed the students to see “what they wanted to learn about” and included specific subgroups in discussions.
“We’re doing sessions, ‘Girls Can, Too,’ there’s a tradesman panel, Mental Health in the Workplace, African Americans in Leadership, panels of entrepreneurs, Women in Leadership,” she said. “We want the students to see, ‘this could be you.’”
Career Day was born out of the “Leaders” facet of Scott County Schools’ Profile of a Learner, Fry said, because RSMS wanted to expose their 720 students to career choices and strong leaders “the earlier, the better.”
“A lot of students don’t get this exposure until they’re in high school or later high school. … We want our leaders in the school to also see other leaders. … We want to bring that to them,” she said. “Really (Career Day is) just focusing on Confident and Responsible Leaders and building them up in younger ages, so that as they’re growing older, they can be more confident in their decisions and responsibilities.”
The event encompasses SCS’ other initiatives like 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Learner, said Counselor Lindsey Smith.
“I feel like all the 7 Habits are wrapped up into today, like Being Proactive,” Smith said. “‘If you want to get here, how are you going to get there?’ Begin with the End in Mind. The whole 7 Habits fits perfectly into today.”
Fry and other administrators reached out to their “friend of a friend of a friend” to secure folks from Off-Broadway to veterinarians to counselors and more, she said. Though they had a diverse crowd this year, she hopes to broaden their contact pool further next year.
“My thing would just be expanding our contacts,” Fry said. “Between word-of-mouth, news, Facebook posts, social media, it can become a thing that’s like, ‘Royal Spring does this every year, it’s a really cool event, everybody looks forward to it.‘“