Collegiate Scholars Program Career Day

Rod Sawyer & I joined a dozen other professionals this afternoon at a career event for Chicago high school students involved in the University's Collegiate Scholars Program.  CSP takes motivated students in the city's charter & regular public schools and helps prepare them for college with extra summer classes and counseling.  It's a wonderful program, a fine example of the important work the University does in the community.

The front room of the Social Services Administration building served as the locale for this event, with a table for each professional.  Pairs of students-- and sometimes their parents-- moved from table to table and asked questions about our career paths, Rod being in the more enviable position of talking about his successful web design company Teffecx.  I tended to steer the students' questions to quality of life issues, explaining how my day job is a reasonably pleasant way of paying the rent, allowing me to live in a wonderful neighborhood and participate in community discussions with people like Rod.

Before the small group career discussions, CSP's Kim Ransom explained the program and showed us a short movie about one aspect of it-- a two-week entrepreneurship class taught by the GSB's Waverly Deutsch.  As Deutsch explained in the movie, you can't really devise a business plan in two weeks, but why tell high school students that?  They divided themselves into teams and came up with elaborate schemes for new ventures-- such as a career preparation center, a business that would mine garbage dumps for recyclable materials, a dessert caterer and an extreme sports shop called E.S.G.O.  The high schoolers' efforts were remarkable, moving even, although I have to admit that one odd marketing ploy made me the proudest: E.S.G.O.'s use of a smidgeon of the Ramones' intro on Blitzkrieg Bop-- "hey ho, ESGO, hey ho ESGO". 

Deutsch and Ransom and their teams are doing some valuable work here and the kids are more than alright.