Every year, the Governors STEM Academy hosts a STEMinar each quarter. For the third quarter STEMinar, a Career Fair was held, allowing many guests to present their careers to the students at HHS. Senior Lucy Ludwig, the Special Events Coordinator for STEM, helped lead the process of preparing for the Career Fair.
“As the Special Events Coordinator, I take the lead on which events we’re going to do, and who’s coming, and then I assign roles to people. [Abby Fornadel,] the Special Events Coordinator before me, had done a career fair her senior year and I attended it. I thought it was great, I learned so much more about what I want to be doing in the future. And so I wanted to make it something that happens every two years, so as a freshman, you’re introduced to what careers there are and which pathway you would like to take,” Ludwig said.
From the beginning of the year, Ludwig was set on holding a Career Fair during one of the STEMinars.
“We knew that it was going to happen, the Career Fair was the big thing that I wanted to have happen. We couldn’t find a date that was in quarter three, which is why we moved it to quarter four, but it is still technically a quarter three STEMinar. I spent two months finding all the people to invite, but we didn’t get any invitations out because we had no date. But then the Friday before spring break is when we got invites out.” Ludwig said.
Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) Professor Steven Johnson was a guest speaker at the STEMinar and presented his career as a Nature Photographer.
I’ve always been interested in photography. I went on to then study digital media, but I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want to spend 16 hours in a dark room all day behind a computer. Instead, I wanted to be outdoors with the natural world. And so I took my photography interest and started to turn it into nature photography, which eventually led me to become interested in protecting the natural world using my photography,” Johnson said.
Over the years as a nature photographer, Johnson became more interested in the science behind his job and connecting with STEM.
“I find that it’s incredibly important to understand your subject. I have a specialty in underwater photography, particularly in salamanders, and so I’ve spent countless hours reading field guides and going out with scientists trying to understand their life cycles so that I can make the best images for that kind of advocacy work as possible. [For nature photography], some big skills would include storytelling, you need to not only understand how to make images but also how to put them together to tell a compelling narrative. Just excellent communication skills are needed, and of course, having technical mastery of things like your camera or filmmaking,” Johnson said.
Executive Director Leigh Evans, of the Shenandoah Valley Tech Council, came to the STEMinar to share and inform what being an Event Manager is like.
“I chose this job because I like to connect people to make innovation happen. And in my job I include STEM. Art and technology are kind of my jam. It is everything about how we create the next level of technology in interpersonal relations. Knowing how to do sales and talk to people is important, and the other part is knowing how to do organizational management. A huge part of event management is ensuring that you can pull off a 200, 300, 400 person event as well as a 10 person event,” Evans said.
Sophomore Micah Blagg is a part of the STEM academy and attended the STEMinar to learn more about new potential careers.
“Nature Photography was really interesting. It’s cool how the guy goes underwater when he takes pictures for his work. However, I don’t think it’s something that I’d want to do. I would rather do other things like music and the engineering for songs and the backing tracks of songs,” Blagg said. “[The STEMinar] was honestly a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. There were a lot of cool careers here to view.”
