Lexington Christian Academy Career Exploration Trips in High Demand
Lexington, MA (PRWEB) June 25, 2018 -- It's 8:00AM on a normal Wednesday, but students are already preparing to leave school. “Where are you going?” asks a curious middle schooler, clearly envious of the group of upperclassmen gathered in the lobby. “We’re going to a hospital to learn about careers in medicine!” one of the students grins back. “A rehabilitation hospital,” another student adds. “It’s going to be awesome.”
First piloted in 2016, the Career Exploration Trip (CET) program allows motivated and curious high school students to visit real-life workplaces to learn about the day-to-day work conducted by doctors, architects, journalists, toy designers, and scientists, among others. The partner organizations are selected based on student interest, and sometimes offer students their first steps into a design studio or a science lab. Trips in past years have also blossomed into summer internships and invaluable shadowing opportunities for particularly keen students.
Hosted by the campus Medical Director Dr. Paul A. Liguori, the students toured Whittier Rehabilitation Hospital’s state-of-the-art facility in Bradford, and were treated to a Q&A session with a physician, a registered nurse, and an occupational therapist. Senior Mikayla Cravens was particularly excited at the opportunity to learn more about the hospital’s prosthetics program, fueling her passion to study prosthetics and biomedical research in college.
The CETs have also continued to provide a valuable opportunity for alumni like Emily Dwyer ’09 to reconnect with Lexington Christian Academy – a place where many students are first introduced to careers like finance and marketing. Presently working as a Research Analyst at Brown Advisory, Emily graduated Smith College in 2013 with a double major in Economics & Environmental Science & Policy, and was thrilled to host students on a CET.
The curiosity of Mariah Walter from Melrose was rewarded on the trip to Brown Advisory with an eye-opening presentation on the wide world of investment management, encompassing fields ranging from private equity to financial planning. “Before I went to Brown Advisory, I had no idea what went into finance, or if I was interested in it. Through the information I learned at Brown Advisory, I have now realized that I definitely am interested and should further investigate finance as a career.”
Design continues to be a top interest area, and this year’s trips did not disappoint. Hosted by Tim Tocci ‘04, a group of students ventured into the Innovation Design Building on a cold January day to visit Continuum, a global design firm renowned designs including the Swiffer line of cleaning products and the Daisy Brand Sour Cream squeeze bottle. After the trip, senior Matthew Greco of Littleton, who will be attending Northeastern next year, shared, “This trip to Continuum exhibited the crossroads between modernization and human centered design. It enabled me to see the relationship between individuals and a team in their creative process of innovation.”
Other design-focused trips included a trip to the Hasbro, Inc. headquarters in Pawtucket, RI, where students learned about the thoughtful construction and complex marketing campaigns behind games like Pie Face and Speak Out. Freshman Briana Torres was especially drawn to Hasbro’s in-house video & commercial production house, Cake Mix Studios; after the trip, she remarked, “The Cake Mix Studios area where they did filming for commercials and editing clips together was my favorite. That experience alone has gotten me more interested in video making and editing, and seeing many of the things I like combined into one job was really awesome, because now I have a more solid plan for what I want to do in my future.”
The school has continued its fruitful partnerships with organizations like the cutting-edge Community Exploration & Learning Lab (CELL) at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, where students were led by Dr. Russette Lyons and Ms. Meghan Spencer in performing a multi-step lab experiment using the polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis to study differences in DNA associated with the ability to taste bitter flavors. Other organizations included the world-renowned architecture firm Perkins + Will and the Bedford-based robotics company iRobot. After the visit to iRobot, where students were introduced to the company’s wide range of consumer-focused and previous-gen military robots, freshman Alyssa Choo of Framingham took home a renewed sense of purpose for her pursuing her passion for engineering.
“I have always been interested in software engineering, and this trip has helped me see how the machines that use the software actually work. It has also helped me see how all the engineers work together and collaborate to bring a together a project.”
As the school year closes, CET co-coordinators Jean Noh and Max Xu eagerly await new partnerships in the year ahead. If you are interested in finding out more about Lexington Christian Academy’s Career Exploration Trip program, please to contact Max Xu at [email protected].
Lexington Christian Academy is an independent college preparatory school that exists to educate young men and women in the arts and sciences in the context of a complete commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jinny Kim, Lexington Christian Academy, http://www.lca.edu, +1 781.862.7850 Ext: 153, [email protected]
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