By Jim Newell

Review Editor

Lake Orion High School plans its first Career Day this May, and high school instructors are looking to partner with area businesses that want to host students to expose them to potential career paths.

“We are looking for businesses to either open their doors to let students come in for a couple hours to get the experience in-house, or we’re also looking for people to volunteer their time on a panel to talk about things they do at their workplace if they can’t have a student come in,” said Julia Dalrymple, DECA advisor and marketing instructor at the high school.

Lake Orion High School’s Career Day – for the high school’s junior class students – will be on May 29, but Dalrymple wants to get local businesses on board as soon as possible.

“It’s all about career exploration and trying to help these kids figure out what they want to do with their lives before they leave our building. It’s like an internship before an internship before they leave high school,” Dalrymple said. “Rosa Everitt, our new CTE (career and technical education) coordinator, used to do this at her old school. So, now we’re bringing it to Lake Orion as something we can do for our students.”

Dalrymple, whose DECA students help out with Orion Area Chamber of Commerce functions, made the announcement at the chamber’s annual economic impact breakfast meeting Jan. 10.

The students will meet as a group in the morning and then break off and head to area businesses with their businessperson, “to see what’s happening in their workplace,” Dalrymple said.

“Then we’re going to come back in the afternoon to debrief, check on everyone’s activities, see what they did and what they learned and have lunch.”

Each student will visit one business during Career Day, with a business potentially hosting multiple students.

“Students were sent a survey to select their top three choices of industry and category and from there were going to narrow it down to where we can match up our local businesses to what our students are looking for,” Dalrymple said.

Any business that would like to participate in Career Day, either by hosting students or participating in the panel discussion, can contact Dalrymple at Julia.dalrymple@lok12.org.

“And we’ll send email confirmation and all that good stuff as we get closer to the event,” Dalrymple said.