Students explore high-tech careers in Manassas

Daniella Zappala and Ryan Peters raced each other to don “clean” suits with booties, hair nets and hoods that covered everything but their eyes.

Their workshop classmates cheered them on and laughed Tuesday as the two dressed in the same white, sanitary, micro-fiber suits that technicians who work for Micron Technology wear every day as they manufacture computer memory components at the company’s Manassas plant.

The drill was part of the Career Learning and Exploration Achieves Rewards, or CLEAR Program, at Northern Virginia Community College.

The students from Manassas Park, Osbourn and Battlefield high schools attending the week-long program got the chance to learn about possible careers.

They also got cookies.

But before they got to eat them they had to simulate making computer chips by icing the cookies, stenciling shapes on the cookies with spray food coloring and then scraping away portions of the icing to simply illustrate how conductors and semi-conductors are assembled to make computer memory chips.

Peters, 14, a rising sophomore at Manassas Park High School, said he was surprised to learn that one Micron memory chip could read a “Harry Potter” book in “less than a minute.”

Denyse M. Carroll, the K-12 Program coordinator at Micron who gave the workshop, said her goal was to get the students thinking about careers before they finish high school.

“I hope the kids are excited about science and realize they have the potential to do whatever they want,” Carroll said.

If they came to work at Micron, even better.

Carroll told the students that companies such as IBM, Motorola and Toshiba all buy memory from Micron.

“They can stay in their own backyard and work in with the big technology industries,” Carroll said.

Emily McPhie, a career coach at Battlefield High School, said she too wanted the students to consider the future and hoped the program got them doing that.

“I would like them to be thinking about what they want to do after high school and appreciating more how high school is relating to whatever they want to do,” McPhie said.

Ia Gomez, a bio-technology instructor at Northern Virginia Community College, led the students through a lab exercise to determine who started an HIV outbreak.

The students had to collect and cross-match samples.

As Gomez led the students through the procedure one piped up from the class and said, “It’s so confusing.”

“It’s very confusing,” Gomez agreed.

In the end, using pipettes, sample cards and the process of elimination the students had narrowed it down to two people who had started the outbreak.

Gomez told them that was as far as they could go without conducting medical histories to determine the one person who had started the outbreak.

The students also learned about possibilities in careers in arts and communications, business, finance, marketing and health and human services through interactive workshops and presentations.

Later in the week they’ll be challenged to a “real world” day where they’ll be asked to choose a career, buy houses and cars and pay taxes.

Battlefield student Shannon Black said she thought the program was worth her time. “I got a lot of information. It just helps a lot getting all the information,” the 16-year-old said.

Mike McFadden, 14, of Battlefield said the program was probably meeting the goals of the adults who were running it.

“I think it kind of explained it well with all of the different programs it was showing us and how with different degrees you can get placement or internships,” McFadden said.

Manassas Bureau Chief Keith Walker can be reached at 703-369-6751.