"The Visit" is an event held on the Utica Campus twice each semester that focuses on the recruitment of high school seniors. They tour and learn more about each program and even have the chance to get some hands-on experience in each department during their half-day here on campus. While covering the last visit, I took the opportunity to really put into perspective some of the things that I had the pleasure to photograph.
The first stop we made was the Barbering Department.
I watched a female student cut a male's hair from start to finish and I kept thinking “I wonder what would happen if she lost focus, and made a mistake."
There’s no erasing a mistake when you’re shaving someone’s head! Then I began to think about the number of people who get their hair cut each day, and how huge of a demand there is for barbers and, thus, barbering students.
Then we moved on to Early Childhood Education. I'm all about the little ones, so of course I didn't want to leave.
We got a chance to watch the college Early Childhood Technology students in lab interact with the children who attend the daycare located on the Utica Campus.
Little Miss Sarah Brown, doing an art activity led by the Early Childhood students on the Utica Campus.
I, of course, began to think about my eight-month-old nephew, Noah, whom I am completely in love with, and the children that I will one day have and hope that their teachers and daycare directors will have come from a program such as the one that we have at Hinds.
Next, was Residential Carpentry. It made me think about the house that I just moved into. I began to wonder if the people who constructed that home graduated from a program such as this one!
Then, we headed over to the most fascinating part of the CTE department (to me) – Welding. It made me think about the cars that we drive so comfortably in, and the highways and bridges that we ride on each day, and the fact that someone had to go through a welding program like the one I was covering for us to have those things.
This isn’t even half of the programs that we toured. Each trade that I got a chance to witness the behind-the-scenes action was like art in its own right -- and took so much precision. It gave me a chance to apply each program’s skillset and the things produced from them to my day-to-day life, and appreciate the students and instructors that make up the Career Technical Education Department at Hinds.
