The Thompson Career Campus has a new program, related to its construction and manufacturing career pathways, that allows students to explore careers across the spectrum of the building trades, from architecture and engineering to construction management.
The ACE Mentoring program (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) connects student interns with professional mentors in the community who work in those fields and helps them explore the various career paths that might interest them.
The class of students, 14 in this first semester, has split into three teams and is in the final stages of designing a mock residential housing plan for a plot of land in Denver.
Students, with the help of their professional mentors, arrive at the TCC each Wednesday at 7 a.m. to design, budget and otherwise prepare a plan for a residential construction project of tiny homes. The presentations will occur before a panel of judges at the University of Colorado-Denver next month.
“They’re here before 7 a.m.,” said Miranda Kantor, work-based learning specialist for the Thompson School District, who organized the program. “They’re excited about it. How many high schoolers will get up every Wednesday morning when they have late start? They work really hard.”
The biggest advantage of the program is the relationship development with the volunteer mentors, Kantor added.
Casey Roberts, an architect at Clark & Enerson, leads the group of professionals, and he said that the students work in a very similar way to professional teams, giving them the opportunity to focus on careers they might be interested in after high school.
“They get a look at the whole construction industry, they see the big picture,” he said. “For each team, individuals can choose where their passion is. So someone will serve as the architect, someone will serve as the contractor, but they’ll all work together.”
Senior Makena Cleveland and Sophomore Kailee Lang are teammates who exhibit this phenomenon. Lang hopes to become an architect, and was sketching houses on draft paper gifted to her by her grandfather and pretending to sell them when she was eight years old, so she handled the design of the team’s tiny homes. Cleveland hopes to work in construction management, saying she always enjoyed being outdoors, working with practical things, and focusing on details.
“I kind of went into this thinking everybody wanted to do interior design,” Lang said of her team. “But we have engineering, architecture, construction management, budgeting, all of it.”
Cleveland is involved heavily in the TCC’s construction career pathway, something that Kantor said was the goal of the program, connecting students to pathways that they might find interesting, or giving students a way to engage with their preferred career path while still on the TCC’s sometimes long waitlist.
She hopes the success of the program will allow it to continue to grow, possibly into a fully fledged pathway of its own, in the coming years, if it’s given community support.
“My hope is that we can continue to get funding to create these pathways,” she said. “We’re trying to find all of these ways to expose kids to different careers without cost, this being one of them.”
