Would tours/shadowing be helpful to a hs student?

soozievt
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:47:08 +0000

Yes, I think it is a great idea as an initial step in high school. Your D can contact various people and ask if she can job shadow for a day. It is a nice inside look to see just what sorts of things these folks do in these specific fields. I recall once my older D (who is now a senior in college) job shadowed someone in a science lab for a full day (she was always good at math and science) and discovered that kind of job was not for her. While not a job shadow, I recall at the start of junior year when she created a temporary college list to explore, she wasn’t sure if she should go into engineering or architecture and so at the first two schools we visited, she visited both departments. After those visits and observing what each was about, she ruled out engineering and from that point on, only looked at schools with architecture. She also did a few other things to see if she liked arch…(though she did not commit to BArch programs, just BA ones)…she did a year long independent study in junior year to learn some skills like arch drawing, etc. with a faculty member. She chose some arch topics for some school papers. Then, the summer after her junior year she did a two week arch internship. The previous winter/spring, she wrote letters to various architects in our town to ask about interning that summer. We have a bunch of architects in our town actually. Most were quite amenable to that. She interviewed and chose one small office and that architect, who is a woman architect in fact, actually gave her some real architectural tasks to do such as building a model, drafting floor plans on AutoCad and by hand, and had her attend site visits and client meetings. So, she was both observing and DOING in that instance. All these things helped contribute to her developing career interest prior to college. She wasn’t ready to commit to architecture as she hadn’t really studied it yet, but she was definitely leaning toward this field and chose colleges that had this major in a liberal arts context.