For Brooklyn middle schoolers, experiencing a career sure beats hearing about it

There’s no comparison between experiencing interesting work and hearing about it. “There’s a lot going on to teach kids about careers, but there’s not much to give them a chance to experience a career,” Emily Jarrell, the principal at the Urban Assembly Unison School in Clinton Hill, told us Tuesday.
It’s very hard to imagine going into something like software engineering or food science if a young person grows up not knowing anyone who does that kind of work. Knowing about it isn’t enough, however. It really needs to be taken out of abstraction and made real. That’s why the public Unison School is teaming up with Citizen Schools, a Boston-based nonprofit that’s working with school districts in seven states to bring apprenticeships into the lives of students in overwhelmingly low-income schools.
Jarrell told us about some real projects students at her middle school have done during after-school programs featuring volunteers from major companies, such as Google, Amplify and Bank of America. Her students have:

• Designed a solar car and then built a prototype out of Legos
• Made a music video, from filming through to post-production
• Designed and built a video game
• Built a homework-tracking app that they installed and demo’d on iPads

Now in its third year at Unison School, Jarrell has negotiated an agreement with Citizen Schools to keep the program going another three years, supported by a grant from the de Blasio administration. Some 175 students will engage in real-world applications of engineering with 56 volunteers over a ten-week period, starting this month.
“We’ve seen year after year that the key to student interest is first-hand experience,” Kathrine Mott, executive director of Citizen Schools New York-New Jersey, said in a press release. “Apprenticeships help transform science, technology, engineering and math from abstract to tangible concepts for our students, which make a difference in their long-term success.”