Dozens of area high-school students who may not go straight to college got a chance Wednesday to learn about different career paths from experts in the fields.
Tulsa Tech, the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Society and the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office teamed up to offer the third-annual "Dream Out Loud" event.
Nathan Hale junior Kiara Catholic attended for the first time. Her interests are in technology, graphic design and animation, and she likes video games.
"That’s one of the things I want to do, like, video game design, be able to, like, create the game and, like, how it works and stuff — and the characters, you know," Catholic said.
Instructors in emergency medical services, manufacturing, welding, health sciences and other fields held workshops at the event.
Owasso junior Taylor West is now a student ambassador for the workshop but attended one himself previously.
"I actually got to do a hands-on training with all of the police equipment, then I got to do a hands-on training with EMSA, because I didn’t really know which one I wanted to do. It was pretty amazing," West said.
TCSO was on hand to showcase its various career opportunites, from civilian posts to S.W.A.T. team member. Sheriff Vic Regalado said working as a detention officer can offer high-school grads a jumping-off point to one of several opportunities.
"They can earn money while going to college. We have college incentive programs, and if they want to go be a police officer or join the federal law enforcement agencies, then they can do that and we’ve provided them that experience," Regalado said.
Around 200 students from McLain, Central, Hale, Union and Owasso attended the event at Tulsa Tech's Lemley campus in north Tulsa.
