“Every year, McLaren Bay Region is proud to participate in the Rotary Vocational Day because this event is important to both students and to McLaren. When the student come to McLaren to job shadow, our employees just shine. You can see the passion for what they do and its energizing for them to show students to pass along some of that passion for what they do every day. We have all kinds of employees who participate: employees like nurses and respiratory therapists, but also our facility and community nutrition employees as well.
The students are excited to explore these careers, too. They come in not knowing exactly what a nurse does, but they get to gown up and go into a surgery and see it first hand. This experience is so valuable to them, regardless if they decide to go into healthcare or not. They get to discover a career they will love, or they find out ‘this isn’t for me’ before they go off to college.
—Laura Love, McLaren Bay Region
“The Rotary Vocational day is an important opportunity for our students in Bay County to discover careers available right here in their community. This Vocational Day event has been going for what we believe is 50 years, started by professionals who saw there was a disconnect between students in schools and opportunities that helped them figure out what their future career would be.
The Rotarians came up with the idea to bring students into their workplaces to let them see first hand the kinds of jobs that were available.
Our high school counselors in Bay County are phenomenal and they work closely with their students. They know their students and their students' interests, so rather than just a random placements of students, and the counselors help place the students with a job that they might be most interested in. It makes the experience more worthwhile and maximizes the possibility of a student pursuing that career right here in Bay County.
—Matt Felan, President & CEO, Great Lakes Bay Regional Alliance
