Nebraska high school students got a chance to skip school on Wednesday and see what college is really like. Students from 16-17 different schools, representing 20 different counties toured the Business and Technology classes at Northeast Community College in Norfolk. Stacy Strawn, Business Instructor at Northeast said, “Career Day itself is designed to give high school students exposure to careers in the business world and the technology field, so we invite high school students from our 20 county area and beyond to come to the day and just see what Northeast has to offer for them.”

Students were guided to almost a dozen Business and Technology programs by student travel agents who are currently attending Northeast. In Graphic Design for instance, students used the Adobe vector software program, Illustrator, to learn how to Live Trace a photo.

In the Health Information Management Systems classroom, the instructor had the students use lego blocks to understand the process of hospital coding. In the Echtenkamp Technology Center, the Information Technology instructors were using computer program code blocks from the online resource Code, to create commands that would make the Angry Bird attack the Pig (those familiar characters from the game app). Students watched videos created by Journalism and Digital Cinema students in the Mass Media presentation, and heard about the opportunities within the Mass Communications field.

Strawn also stated, “There are 10 different career stops, some are umbrellaed, like the Media Arts, which includes Broadcasting, Audio Recording and Digital Cinema, so they will get a little bit from all three of those. The Business program has about six or seven in it. We just wanted the students to get a feel for all of the potential careers they could get in one of our programs.” Other stops on the tour were Business Administration, Drafting, Accounting, Banking and Business.

For lunch, the students were invited to the campus cafeteria. They also attended sessions about college preparedness and what they expect out of college life. After lunch they were taken back to any programs they had additional interest in and had time to speak with instructors one on one. At 1:30 p.m, the students gathered in the Cox Activities Theatre for chances to win souvenirs like t-shirts and stress balls. Strawn says the Business and Technology Career Day is a good way to get to know Northeast. “We find that a lot of the students know that Northeast is here, but many of them don’t know what they get when they come to Northeast, so we want to show them quality education. We have choices that allow you to explore and kind of get them thinking early.”