tl;dr We talked to 25 juniors from Fremont Bergan High School about entrepreneurship

What is CareerRockIt?

A few months ago, Sycamore Education and the Fremont Creative Collective were asked to participate in CareerRockIt which is a program aimed to give students real-job experience. Businesses are encouraged to host students and let them get a first hand look at what life in industry is like. Because of my dual role at Sycamore and the FCC I was able to lead two separate sessions.

Coding experience

The first CareerRockIt session was an ‘experiential’ session. These sessions were much longer and in-depth. We stated that we could accept no more than 3 students to this session. Our goal was two full days of pair programming with those students. We ended up getting matched with a High School senior and a college senior, both from Omaha. They made the drive up to Sycamore HQ and we learned the basics of web development- HTML, CSS and Javascript. They made a cool soundboard that they then hosted online via Github Pages.

Here you can see Jeremiah, the Tech Lead for Sycamore, giving the two students a crash course in the LAMP stack.

Entrepreneurship

The second CareerRockIt session was about ‘How to think like an entrepreneur’. This session was sponsored by the Fremont Creative Collective and we had been matched with a class of Juniors from Fremont Archbishop Bergan High School. We wanted to have this session in the May Brother’s Building but it wasn’t ready for us. After 3 postponements, the event took place today (May 4th).

It was an amazing 4 hours with these students learning about the different aspects of starting your own business. They heard from Connie Kreikemeier from Midland University about the Gallup BP10 assessment, Glen Ellis of Sycamore and the FCC about the building’s history and the vision for the Creative Collective, Nick Schreck from Midland University about the importance of social media in marketing and customer service. I even talked pretty generally about the kind of things that entrepreneurs need to be thinking about. My slides are below.

I love these kind of activities because it exposes younger kids to all the cool things that they can choose to do with their lives. I wish I had someone telling me in high school that you can program computers all day for a living or that you can build really cool things and have people buy them from you and make lots of money.