A different kind of Career Day
May 21—BEREA — A lawyer, an IT specialist, a baker, an engineer, and two journalists walked into a middle school gymnasium on Thursday.
Those varied professionals were taking part in a Career Day event held at Farristown Middle School — one organized with the goal of teaching eighth grade students on some of the more surprising challenges they will run into as they become adults.
The Register was invited to participate in the event, with senior reporter Blake Vickers and Kentucky Press Association Summer Intern Debra Murray getting to sit down and answer questions about journalism from rotating groups of students.
Other professionals in attendance were Leah Lowe of Chaos Confections Bakery, members of the Berea Police Department, Detective Leslie Strong of the Kentucky State Police, members of EKU's College of Justice and Safety and EKU's Division of Natural Areas, David Ward, a lawyer and military veteran, Dr. Sean Jackson of the Kentucky Department of Education, members of Madison County EMS, members of the Berea Fire Department, New Vista Counseling, author Dan Bryant, WBON TV, Hitachi, diesel mechanic Craig Johnson and Devin Price of Surge! Graphic Design.
"Probably the cookie that I got... at the bakery booth," Max Mattox said when he was asked about his favorite part of the event. He also shared his thoughts on newspapers after visiting the Register's booth at Career Day.
"It's really interesting that all these pages from the newspaper are all back in the day," Mattox said.
The event was organized by eighth grade social studies teacher, Sheera Caudill, who had found that past career day events her students had been to did not give accurate information about some salaries.
"We had a 'Reality Store' districtwide and it is very similar to what we had, but with different numbers. Kind of outdated numbers and not as many categories," Caudill said. "What I did is I kind of took the last couple weeks and did some research on local job listing and collected a couple of places... I matched them up with what my kids told me they were interested in."
The information Caudill gathered was used to create a "Reality Day" event, where students would pick a job and simulate living — akin to the classic board game "Life." Caudill factored in several of the challenges of the adult world which students likely have never thought about, including how their chosen career's salaries would affect everything from health insurance, student loans, gas prices, and more.
"I felt like I wanted to update it and include those real life things and show them that life is a bit more than just a number on a page and that their paycheck wouldn't go as far as they thought," Caudill said.
She went to painstaking detail in putting the event together — even working in the current local prices for internet access, and car payments (for this she used listing from a local car dealership). Caudill joked that several students asked if they could ride a bicycle to work after seeing the average cost of buying a car.
Caudill has been asked to put together the event on a districtwide level. While she initially wasn't interested, Caudill said she almost immediately changed her mind.
"I did have something like this when I was in eighth grade, but not to this scale," Caudill said. "As a social studies teacher it's kind of just part of our standards to introduce them to those sorts of things like not just in government in the past, but also government in the current day. How our society works. That was the other goal, not only to show them careers and that life is a thing but that there's so much more that they're not realizing and thinking of, but that they are almost at the age that they have to think of those things."
