In something unprecedented for Westside, the Warrior Walkway played host to a STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — career fair yesterday, Jan. 28. Over 10 businesses and colleges, including Gallup, HDR, DLR Group, the University of Nebraska Omaha and more, were featured.

The event was run as part of the CAPS program, which is funded by the $2.6 million Youth Career Connect grant the district was awarded last year. The fair was the first of a planned four total career fairs. The next three will be in the fields of information technology, health sciences and business in February, March and April, respectively.

Melissa Hansen, the district’s kindergarten through 12th grade Career Education, Readiness and Transitions (CERT) program director and the person in charge of implementing the district’s CAPS program, said she was happy with the turnout for the event, which saw packed booths during the early part of lunch mods throughout the day.

“[The turnout] tells me students are hungry for the information on STEM and they’re excited to see people besides the teachers in the building to ask real-world questions of,” Hansen said. “I think it’s been a very, very favorable response, which I’m super pleased about.”

Junior Cam Hickey, who walked around many of the booths and spent a significant amount of time speaking with representatives for Gallup, heaped praise on the career fair. Hickey even compared the fair to others he has seen at the university level.

“This is eerily similar to the career stuff I’ve seen at the colleges I visited this summer,” Hickey said. “And this is almost better because instead of looking at the majors, I’m talking to the people who recruit for those jobs.”

Hickey said Gallup and one other company caught his eye, and he hopes to use the information he learned during the career fair to gain work experience.

“I was talking to one of the guys at Gallup, and I can work an internship here and then while I’m in college I can work years as well,” Hickey said. “So I can have five years of experience with the company before I even get a job, and that’s just fantastic.”

The district’s business education liaison, Kathy McGauvran, was in charge of putting together the event. Hansen said it was put together to fulfill requirements of the Youth Career Connect grant.

“One of the components of the grant is that we need to engage employers in the schools,” Hansen said. “This is one of the ways we are engaging employers because as teachers, we can talk until we’re blue in the face about stuff, but we don’t always know the relevant application piece of it so our employers are coming in to tell students about the engagement and application of whatever the topic is.”

The businesses represented at the career fair came from connections teachers at Westside have made as well as businesses that have said they would be part of the school’s grant requirement fulfillments.

“We just tapped into a lot of different business that we believe have a connection to STEM,” Hansen said. “Next month, we’ll focus on information technology companies.”