Today was the 7th annual Workforce Innovations conference here at RIT (and my 4th - wait, really?! - time participating). The format was like any other year: upwards of 100 high school students descend upon RIT for a keynote, two workshops, and lunch at Gracie's. This year's Imaging Science workshop had a pretty good number of students signed up, with 16 in my first group and 19 in my second (second greatest numbers of any workshop, only behind Hospitality). I'll take it.
This year I went back to my usual presentation with the FLIR minus the twitter component I introduced last year. Even though it kind of worked, to be honest, I didn't have the energy for it this year; nor did I have a helper to monitor the tweets like I've had in the past. While it is unfortunate that our Twitter account didn't get as much attention this year, I don't think the lack of Twitter negatively influenced the experience had by the audience. Not only that, but I don't think that last year's inclusion of it had any lasting impact beyond the day-of. The students never interacted again, save for the one bright spot we had by way of a student saying he was going to apply for the summer internship - which in the end never panned out.
So, back to the normal routine. And that's pretty much how the whole thing went - entirely normal. Just like in past years, I had a mixed experience. My first group was meh, alright; my second group was fantastic. It is strange how two completely different experiences can be had in the span of one morning. But like I've said before, the makeup of the audience presents a challenge (if you're not sure what I mean, check out some past posts). Although, I did enjoy seeing the niece of a good friend of mine, who had no idea what I do and it was total coincidence that we crossed paths today.
The good news is I didn't have anyone blatantly talking, texting, or sleeping (except for one of the chaperons... way to set an example) during my presentations. And the even better news is I did have one student who said he is already coming to RIT in the fall for Engineering Exploration, and he really liked what he heard today. I strongly encouraged him to ask about the freshmen class and he seemed excited about that, so hopefully we'll see him in the fall!
Looking forward, I think I will make the suggestion that we shorten the length of the workshops. One hour just seems to be too long for these kids... No matter how enthusiastic they start out, they seem to fizzle around 40-45 minutes. This makes sense, considering that most schools have class periods of about that length. I don't blame the kids at all. I wish I could stretch out the interactive portion of my workshop to fill more of the hour, but it too would get boring after a while. So I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, but I think shortening up the workshops would be great (for us at least). If you have any ideas, please, leave them in the comments!
All in all, I think the conference went well. (Oh, except for the one student volunteer who didn't show up to guide my first group to me from the keynote...)
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