The problem
Student guesses at a major, goes to college for 4+ years, tries a career for 2+ years, decides they don’t like it, then they go back to school to try again.. This isn’t efficient.
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Students often experience anxiety while in high school and college due to uncertainty about what career to choose. A student might have a doctor in their family, but they might not have someone in finance, or an attorney, or a police officer. By bringing pros into the schools, we offer students a diverse set of low key conversations so that they can gain clarity of what a profession they are curious about is like.
Pros in schools are also different than career counselors because counselors don't have real world experience with the professions they give advice about.
Pros in Schools is different than career day, since students don't necessarily know what questions they have in an hour or a day. Real questions about careers formulate over time, and it's important for a relevant pro to be available at that moment when an important question comes up "Am I even smart enough to do this?" or "How do nurses deal with a person in pain?" or "Don't pens sell themselves to those who need them?"
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Willing pros fall into 3 categories.
First are parents who have kids in the schools.
Second are retirees.
Third are pros who are aiming at management in the future and are looking to master management skills, and plant seeds for potential future employees on how to prepare for the next 5-8 years before they apply to their company.
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Companies are always looking to give back to their communities, and what better way to do that by investing in their future leaders!
Our approach
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Pros in schools
Willing pros come to classrooms with a varying frequency but consistent basis .
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Lesson plan collab
Willing teachers publish their lesson plans on git, and willing pros provide real life scenarios of those concepts in action. This means no need to come into the classroom to help the next gen!
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Students in profs
Students visit pro environments to get familiar with what it would be like to work in a certain profession.
Our efforts
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Platform
Platform that streamlines collaboration among teachers and pros. Includes functionality such as; basic onboarding, scheduling, and questionnaires to track profession interest by students.
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Pilots
Starting in small pilot experiments, with minimal commitments, as we perfect a working model, our aim is to provide participation channels to a larger set of willing teachers and pros.
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Legislation
Similar to veterans serving the country, professionals who make sacrifices by giving back to their community through schools should have similar benefits to veterans when buying houses or electronics as a way to say “thank you for serving our country”. Please note that since Pros in Schools is a 501(c), and this initiative involves grants and legislation, it is handled by a sister entity.
Why/How it works
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Diversity of professions
As a student I might have a doctor in my family, but maybe I don’t have an attorney, or an actuary, or an engineer. The idea is that we utilize the diverse set of professions that exist among willing parents and other volunteers, to help students understand their career options more fully, by having pros in schools on a consistent basis thats managable.
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Questions formulate over time
Career counselors are great, but unfortunately they don’t have the real world experience that back their advice. And career days are good too, but students don’t know what questions to ask all in one day. Real important questions students have about their career formulate over weeks or months. Therefore by having consistent exposure to a diverse set of pros, and to have a relevant pro be available when a students question formulates, is what creates clarity for students. That feedback between the current and next generation is what we are trying to accomplish.
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Pros manage a class
A pro comes in bi weekly, teach a class related to their profession, at the end students ask questions about their profession. We track student career clarity over the year with questioners.
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Not a trade school
Our goal and vision is to create clarity and confidence in what careers students want to peruse, as early as possible. Specifically our mission has more to do with avoiding career switches(not that having multiple careers are bad), but we want to avoid career misguidance, through providing guidance from a wide variety of professions.
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What about budget?
Assume each willing pro has 3 days of volunteering hours per year (which is pretty standard).
Assume ~8 months for the school year, i.e. ~2 months per quarter.
If a pro came to the school, for a given class, bi-weekly, this would require 4 days of volunteering per quarter, which means 16 days of pros in schools per year per class. Which means a teacher would need ~5.33 pros to come in throughout the whole year, per class to work with the existing budget.
If each classroom had ~20 students, assume this means ~30 parents, this would mean you’d need approximately 15% of those parents to have a related profession to the class to make this work, and be willing. This doesn’t account for colleagues of the parents, or retired grandparents etc.
Future PrOs in Schools
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Cowboy players recently spotted playing in a public chess tournament with chess Grandmasters. Well, this proves that these pro athletes have the spare time to come to a gym class and tell students about the relevance of horizontal and vertical communication skills for pro athletes!
June 2024, Richland Hills, NYTEX Sports Center, Universal Chess Tour