How Our Workshops Inspire Imagination
This Winter and Spring, we continued to host several Imagining Your Future hands-on workshops for high school students. Topics included: articulating your vision for your ideal work environment, networking exercises, elevator pitches, finding and landing internships and other at-work experiences, informational interviews, meeting with adults to discuss their career paths, and learning about developing winning attitudes and skills.
Our workshops were for a variety of different students, including those in our Imagining Your Future pilot program and in affinity groups such as the College Partnership Program (CPP). CPP is designed to mitigate the impact of barriers to access and opportunity, and support students who are from populations that are historically underrepresented on college campuses
What do these workshops look like? Here are two examples:
Using Play-Doh to Combine Strengths and Make a Difference
Forty high school students met in March in small groups to explore their individual strengths and interests. Each group discussed two big questions:
-
-
-
What does the world need from us, given our shared strengths?
-
What is something we could create together?
Each group used Play-Doh to bring their ideas to life and to build visual representations of their answers. Watch this short video below to see their amazing creations!
Dreams About Your Future
In April, students were invited to review a short booklet of reflections and cartoons created by Haraseeket’s Peter Vorkink. Each student also used a “dream template” to take notes or draw.
Seven small groups consisting of 5-6 students and 2 adults each then discussed a variety of questions. The questions included:
-
-
- What do your next 5, 10, 15 years look like? When you think about your future, what do you dream about? If you were to picture your ideal future, what would be some important elements included in the picture in terms of work life, family life, volunteering and hobbies and interests? How can you achieve these dreams? What steps would you need to take to get there? What role does college play in your dreams (if you plan to go)?
- What obstacles might get in your way? Do you see financial obstacles? Academic obstacles? Other obstacles? What can you do to overcome these obstacles, and realize your dreams? Are the obstacles brick walls? Can you turn any brick walls into hurdles you can jump over?
Each of the seven groups were also asked to imagine and discuss three different lives:
Life One—this is your current plan, what you are thinking about doing ten years from now. It’s the plan you’ve already got in mind.
Life Two—this is what you’d do if your first plan was suddenly gone. It happens. Imagine that whatever you planned to do after high school is no longer an option. You can’t do nothing, so what would you do instead? When you really push yourself to imagine an alternative plan, you’ll come up with new possibilities.
Life Three—this is what you’d do if money or image were no object. If you knew you could make a decent living at it, and that no one would laugh at you or think less of you for doing it, what would you do? This is your dream life.
Student representatives from each of the seven groups then reported to all on highlights of their conversations. We heard some amazing insights and dreams!
|
.jpg)
