Fair Teaches High-Tech Lessons : Education: San Diego companies join to prepare children for the technologically oriented society and information-based economy of tomorrow.
Eight hundred San Diego students got a lesson in high-technology and biotechnology at the Expotech ’92 job fair Thursday.
Ray Bunker, a bright, mathematically inclined senior at Kearny High School in San Diego, was among the seventh- to 12th-graders who browsed around 41 exhibition booths set up by high-technology companies at the San Diego Tech Center in Sorrento Valley.
“It seemed like a lifelike newspaper ad for selling these companies,” the 17-year-old said.
He and several schoolmates said they came to the event not just to see high-tech demonstrations but to learn how they could become involved in those companies through internships or other programs.
But, Bunker lamented, “a lot of the people at the booths said they didn’t know if they had internships, or that they didn’t have them now.”
The exhibition brought together people who want to change that.
The event began with a business round table called “Technology and Education: San Diego’s Link to the Future.”
Speakers such as Jeffrey Kirsch, executive director of Balboa Park’s Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater, stressed the importance of private industry working with the public sector--especially schools--to prepare children for the technologically oriented society and information-based economy of tomorrow.
In light of that, Bunker’s science teacher, 28-year-old Jeff Bush, was a little surprised by what he didn’t find at Expotech:
“I think if they have an exposition like this they should offer something to the students, a way to get involved,” Bush said. “ . . . The first reaction my students had to (Expotech) was ‘yeah, it’s neat, but we can’t be a part of it.’ ”
He came up short in his search for industry internships for his students, he said. At least, until he ran into Jerry Caulder, chairman, president and CEO of Mycogen Corp., a Sorrento Valley company that develops, manufactures and markets biopesticides.
Caulder told Bush that Mycogen is having the opposite problem: The firm couldn’t fill two high school laboratory internships last summer and was surprised that it received only a handful of applications for a summer program at the firm for science teachers.
Together, they decided to call upon the high-tech and biotech industry to set up a committee to give internships to high school students.
“I’ll be sending these companies letters,” Bush said, “and will try to start some kind of a relationship (between them and the school). I’ve got students who could, and want to be, doing something for them.”
Mycogen already is donating used computer equipment and the time of its employees to University City High School. “I want to make a big impact in a small way,” Caulder told Bush.
As hundreds of students began pouring into Expotech, Caulder explained that, when he was a child, “I always looked at scientists as nerds that stood in labs and did weird things.” But today much of science is business, he says, and students need to be exposed to all its facets at an early age in order to grasp how science affects their lives and how they can be a part of it.
