High School Students Experience NIC
Photo from: Stella Kirsch
A photo of graphic design posters for Spokane International Film Festival done by a student at NIC.
March 4, 2015
North Idaho College hosted a tech tour for promising students from as far away as Oregon. This tour allowed students to chose four sessions out of the 20+ provided. All of the sessions were about the technical classes and A.A.S. degrees you could acquire at NIC and other community colleges.
The day at NIC started out in the auditorium at Boswell Hall on the NIC campus. All of the students were seated in the auditorium and listened to an opening speech and then were given the chance to answer trivia questions about NIC and their technical program for some neat prizes. A few students were given tee shirts and one sweatshirt was given out.
Next the students went to their first sessions. I participated in this tech tour and I went to a session about Computer Information Technology. The speaker Randy Graves showed us a lot of interesting facts about being an IT person in this day and age. He also told us a nice piece of advice, “Do a job because you love it, not because you love the money.” He was referring to his own decision to become an IT guy, even with the good pay, it was because he loved computers.
Do a job because you love it, not because you love the money.”
— Randy Graves
The next session I attended was about Graphic Design. A very nice instructor had his students describe a day-to-day schedule in the graphic design program. Then, we were all given notecards and told to design our names in an creative way. Once we were all done he showed the group our final products. They were all very nice and then the session ended with any questions we had.
The third session I attended was about Computer Aided Mechanical Design. We learned about the mechanical design world using computers. The field of CAD is a growing field and is becoming a highly sought-for job. We then got a tour of a classroom where students were working. We also go to see a 3D printer in action.
My last session was about Aerospace mechanics. We looked at machines and learned about the field. This sessions we mostly got to do hands-on activities with the machines and we didn’t learn a lot. The day ended with a debrief and more trivia questions and prizes. The trip was well worth it and a lot of information was learned about technical programs at NIC.
