THOUSAND OAKS : Students Get a Look at Possible Career Paths

Ditching classwork for a day, several dozen teen-agers in Thousand Oaks spent Tuesday testing future career options at various employers ranging from the phone company to a hospital and city offices.

Organized by the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Conejo Valley Unified School District, Student Shadowing Day matched high school students with career fields of their interest. And like the nationwide Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the Thousand Oaks event was intended to give the students a realistic look at the working world.

“It’s a great opportunity to experience (the workplace) firsthand,” said Karen Levett, a senior at Thousand Oaks High School, who wants to become a doctor. Otherwise, she said, students are “waiting and going to school and thinking you know what you want to do, but not being sure.”

At Los Robles Regional Medical Center, she and five other students toured the hospital, from the neonatal unit under construction to the emergency room where security has been tightened because of gang-related violence.

Levett watched in the cardiac catheterization lab as a doctor threaded a tiny camera through a patient’s aorta to view a blocked artery. Watching on a monitor, she also viewed a video of an earlier angioplasty in which a patient’s clogged artery was opened with a balloon-like instrument.

In the hospital’s blood bank, 17-year-old Summer Field, clad in a white lab coat, watched as a technician demonstrated how blood is sorted by type, and then tested for antibodies.

“It was kind of familiar to me because we did a kind of blood typing in my anatomy class, but not with real blood,” she said.

At GTE California Inc., another half-dozen students learned about the company’s massive billing operation and what it takes to deliver phone service to new areas.

After spending several hours with Sharon Cooper, a traffic engineer for GTE, Westlake High junior Allison Littleford said she had a new appreciation for the dial tone.

“There’s a lot you don’t even realize,” she said. “When you pick up the phone and hear the dial tone, you don’t think about how much work people have to do to get that dial tone to your house.”