thinkAG Career Crawl

Thanks to a wonderful opportunity initiated and coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture (Outlook Office), area Grade 11 and 12 Sun West School Division students experienced a full-day of learning specifically relating to our province’s agriculture and agri-food sector.  On Wednesday, October 14th, students, teacher chaperones, and Ministry representatives, travelled from Outlook, SK by charted bus to Saskatoon with organized visits at Star Produce, Discovery Seeds, Farm Credit Corporation, New Holland, and Moody’s.  Students explored different agricultural occupations, from finance and manufacturing, to wholesale food processing and laboratory technologies.  Students were afforded the opportunity to learn about the broad scope of the industry as well as the impact technology and innovation has on its viability and on environmental sustainability.

Some feedback from participants:
“I thought it was a really good experience to see all of the jobs, even though I may not want to do all of them. I discovered that in order to get a job at Discovery Labs that you could have a degree in microbiology and that it would be really interesting to be a buyer from Star Produce.” 

“I thought it was a very good experience.  It even exposed me the world of how tomatoes get to our dinner table.”

“Thank you for allowing students like myself this amazing opportunity. I enjoyed seeing how equipment was built, and how automation has gradually grown over time!”

“This experience was very interesting, enjoyable, and helped me figure out that agriculture has many different aspects, other then just farming and surveying. I enjoy math and building objects a lot and I found out that engineering had to do lots with math and building. This made me discover that I am interested in engineering.”

“I had never heard of Star Produce before and was really surprised by the wide-range of Ag-related occupations within their organization.  Personally, I don’t know if I would survive as a production line worker, but I really thought the buying and coordinating jobs at the corporate office sounded exciting and can really see why a background in agriculture is necessary.”

Search #agcareercrawl15 on Twitter for some moments and captured throughout the day.

A heartfelt thank you to the Ministry of Agriculture for creating this unique ag-focussed career investigation experience for our students.  It was awesome to participate in such a meaningful and well organized event.  As well, we are grateful to the business people who opened their doors to us and shared ag-related information.

Thanks, also, to our area Career Development Teachers who communicated the opportunity with students/parents and organized travel arrangements.  Team work!

A fantastic day of learning and discovery.