Shepherd students explore career possibilities

SHEPHERD The beginnings of dozens of productive and rewarding careers were possibly launched Friday at Shepherd High School.

The schools 270 students spent their last day before the holiday break attending a career fair. Students tapped into the expertise of about 40 presenters who spent about 45 minutes per session communicating to students the spark that keeps them coming to work each morning.

For Pete Thompson, who sells artificial joints for Biomet, attention to detail helping the medical team get the new joint fitted just so can extend and enhance a patients quality of life for decades after knee or hip replacement surgery.

If our people get it right, it can last 20 years, he said. (The surgical teams) job is to put it in just right. Our job is to help them accomplish that.

Thompson augmented his talk with real-life props: cobalt chrome parts and ball-and-joint combinations, which he distributed around the room. He had a ready answer for the How do your patients get through airport screening? question: We have a card explaining why people have set off the alarm.

Kathleen Armstrong, who owns Spectrum Group Architects in Billings and offered her talk in the classroom manned by her husband, Jeff, tossed candy canes to spur student responses while demonstrating how she uses 3-D computer modeling to give clients a ready and easily altered cutaway view of the home shes designing.

If a client says, I dont like siding on this wall, I can make it brick or stone, she said, demonstrating with a few keystrokes how easy that is. You dont have to erase and change everything, because one change goes to every elevation. I dont have to do it individually and by hand.

In a nearby classroom, Karlee Omsberg, a radiologic technologist with St. Vincent Healthcare, told students something that must have been music to their ears: She started working at the hospital this spring a full month before graduating from college.

She applauded the number of boys in the classroom, noting that her field is dominated by women.

She told students shes in close daily contact with doctors, and is often present in the room when a trauma patient is admitted, awaiting X-ray or CT scan orders. She brought along a light box to display an array of X-rays depicting all kinds of painful developments, including broken bones and a separated shoulder.

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Shepherd students explore career possibilities