Hugo holds GEAR UP Career Fair

Hugo students learned about southeastern Oklahoma careers last week as the school held a Career Fair featuring 29 career speakers.

The fair, held November 7, was sponsored by the Southeastern Oklahoma State University Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) Partnership as part of a career mini-grant program for the month of November, which is National Career Month. Susan Stepp, Hugo High School Counselor and GEAR UP Site Coordinator, coordinated the event.

Students chose five fields in which they were most interested, and participated in 20-minute sessions with speakers representing those fields. Professionals from medicine, law enforcement, wildlife, social services, farming, real estate, banking, insurance, industrial arts, science cosmetology and more spoke at the Career Fair.

Because of the event’s tremendous success with students, the high school will likely make the Career Fair a yearly event, Stepp said.

“Students got a chance to see real careers represented by real people. The professionals of Hugo were good enough to sacrifice their time so that our students could explore their future after high school, which is so important,” Stepp said.

The SOSU GEAR UP Partnership is a federally grant funded program that serves 1,852 eleventh- and twelfth-graders in 14 schools in Bryan, Choctaw and McCurtain counties. The schools are: Achille, Bennington, Boswell, Broken Bow, Caddo, Calera, Colbert, Durant, Fort Towson, Hugo, Rock Creek, Silo, Soper and Valliant.

For more information on GEAR UP, call (580) 745-3122 or visit www.se.edu/gearup.