FAIRBURY - It's never too soon for young students to start identifying potential career plans, and considering the steps they need to ensure they are on the right career path – and a statewide education simulation called Connecting the Dots works to help high schoolers do just that. 

Ninth and tenth graders from a handful of schools across Southeast Nebraska filled the Jefferson County 4H Building Monday for the latest installment of a statewide program called Connecting The Dots.  

Executed by educators with the University of Nebraska Extension, anchored Monday by Southeast Nebraska's Jacie Milius, Connecting the Dots is a Nebraska-wide operation that aims to expose kids to a wide range of potential career paths, outline the steps needed to pursue them, equip them with required tools like resumes, and introduce them to industry experts.  

The students identified a couple of their own areas of interest, and then had the chance to meet with more than a dozen locals from Fairbury and the surrounding area who volunteered to share their expertise across fields like business, health sciences, and government - all working to showcase the many different potential career paths that the students could consider pursuing. 

“We are exposing youth to the wide range of careers that are out there. We are having them explore different careers and start thinking about what their career pathway looks like in the future,” said Ann Domesh, a University of Nebraska extension educator based in Seward County. “So many times, we have this idea of a set career or a set group of careers, but there are so many options for youth out there. Just to start seeing that, their interests are going to align with something down the road. There is something out there for them.” 

Part of the challenge of the simulation is that each pair of students must determine what the smoothest path towards their desired career looks like: should they enroll in a four-year college, or would a two-year college suffice? Should they consider the military, or just enter the workforce out of high school? 

On top of that, all students were randomly dealt a "Luck of the Draw" card which forces them to deal with an extra unexpected element - possibly beneficial like a full-ride college scholarship, or possibly detrimental like needing to foot the medical bills for a sick relative.  

“I love visiting with the students, and I love when their eyes are opened towards the possibilities,” Domesh said. “And even just visiting with a student today about the careers he looked at, he didn’t realize that those were possibilities and they sounded interesting to him. So just seeing the students light up, realizing the possibilities for their future...it’s great.” 

Connecting the Dots operates seminars like this for different sizes of student groups across the state all year long. And ultimately, the program is designed to show that while planning for life and a career is not always easy, many fulfilling possibilities exist, and there are many different ways to get there.