3,000 students head to JA career event

OCEAN CITY, Md.- On Thursday, 3,000 students on the Eastern Shore went on a field trip to the Ocean City Convention Center to get a look at different career paths.

“If you can just expose them to a little piece, you know and drive some interest, then people will start to expand their horizons, and I guess start to address what it is I’m going to do in my later life,” Roland Wescott, NASA Program Support Manager, said.

This is the second year in a row the Junior Achievement of the Eastern Shore has put on this event, where businesses from the Shore come and expose 8th grade students to various career opportunities.

“There’s an emergency room at PRMC, there’s a rocket here at the NASA booth, so it’s really about hands on experiential learning,” Lisa Thornton, JA Development Manager, said.

Event organizers said exposing kids to events like this at a young age will help set them up for success down the road.

“They don’t understand what all these careers look like, so it’s important for us to show them,” Thornton said.

“To try to turn the light on to make them understand how important it is to know what it is you want to do,” Wescott said.

Students like Amari Cottman, who wants to go in the medical field, agreed that events like this are important.

“I think it’s actually helpful it gives people an idea of what they want to do with their lives and it’s gives them more education and information about the thing that they want to do,” Cottman said.

While Thursday’s event was successful, businesses said they are already ready for next year.

“I’m absolutely certain we’ll be here next year,” Wescott said.

47ABC was told they had even more booths this year than they did last year.

In 2019,  they had 95 booths, this year they had 140.

And they served more students this time around as well.

Last year, they hosted thirteen hundred students from Wicomico County schools, and this year they opened the event up to all six counties on the shore, hosting 3,000 students.