Freshmen from New Bremen, Minster and New Knoxville started planning their future outside of the classroom on Monday(2/29/16).
"I want to be a history teacher, " said Cole Harrison, Freshman at New Bremen High School.
"I've been thinking about occupational therapist," said Lauren Dwenger, a freshmen at Minster High School.
These two are only freshmen, but are already exploring their options for the future. They came to Wright State Lake Campus on Monday for Exploration Academy, a program that takes students out of their classroom to a college campus to hear from professionals about careers that might interest them.
"I liked the first one where we learned everything in general, all the different things you can go into," Dwenger said.
"Different career paths you can go into, and how many years you have to go to college and stuff like that," said Harrison.
176 students attended six different sessions at Wright State Lake Campus from electrical and technical, to physical therapy and marketing all to figure out where they'll end up in their careers.
This year, they could choose to hear from 44 speakers, most professionals who work and live in Auglaize and Mercer counties.
"That way they know that there is opportunities in their own backyard," said Angela Hamberg, Economic Development Director of the Village of New Bremen.
One of them was Christine Purdy, who talked to student about insurance and different possibilities within that field.
"If you can inspire them early on they might even consider, 'wow I never even thought about insurance' and they can have a lot of different careers inside the insurance arena," Purdy said. "There's a lot of diff careers, especially in insurance, and that they can really understand what would be important for them from a college stand point, to go into a major that they can get a job out when they graduate."
And while they are only freshmen, and some may think it's too early to think about a career, organizers say it's important to plant a seed of interest.
"There are so many options, it's hard for even a senior to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives, so sometimes it's about a process of elimination, and if they can start exploring as freshmen, which we allow them to do here, where they have six sessions, they start crossing things off the list to narrow what specifically what they want to do," Hamberg said.
And they also know starting early can only help.
"You want to be ready, because it comes around faster than you think," said Dwenger.
