For young children, the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” might solicit answers like race car driver, paleontologist or maybe even president.
Those goals might sound lofty, but some summer camps in the Indianapolis area are showing middle- and high-schoolers realistic pathways to those dreams.
IBJ checked in with four summer camp programs, at three locations, that are giving students real-world work experiences. Organizers hope the camps spark an interest that helps fill the next generation of their respective workforces.
Careers in the racing world
Middle-schoolers in Indianapolis can get a real sense of what it’s like to code an autonomous car or manage an IndyCar team as part of a summer camp next month at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The new program at the remodeled IMS Museum will give students a hands-on experience in technology and manufacturing while showing them the business of IndyCar.
Campers in the Robo Racers program will build and code autonomous Lego robots to race against one another—work that builds on existing and new STEM skills.
Jake Apollos, IMS Museum director of education, said the program is key at a time when, according to 2022 data from the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, 35% of graduates from Indiana’s public universities leave the state.
“If we can tie them to a race team and show them that there is a connection in what they’re passionate for in this racing world since most of the teams are here, we can help lock these individuals into the state of Indiana and build our own workforce and prominence in those areas,” Apollos said.
A second camp at the museum, called Racing Careers, will introduce students in the seventh and eighth grades to the array of jobs in motorsports. The students will be tasked with building a miniature, battery-powered race car. Although the cars are essentially toy cars, the lesson also includes real-world math and budgeting.
There might also be some curveballs. For example, “a motor might go bad, and they have to purchase another one,” Apollos said.
Apollos has 13 years of classroom experience, working with students in science and robotics. He crafted the curriculum for Robo Racers and Racing Careers with other members of the museum’s education team, which consists of two teachers and a manager with gallery experience. For the program on racing careers, the museum partnered with career readiness nonprofit Project Lead the Way.
Racing teams are interested in programs like this because most mechanics will retire within the next decade, Apollos said.
“They want to start targeting younger populations, to show them that there is a viable, successful and lucrative career in the racing world,” he told IBJ.
The camps don’t begin until mid-July. However, Apollos said the reception from youth visiting the museum that recently underwent a $61 million revamp has been remarkable. Students on field trips have been particularly interested in the new starting line experience and the Borg Warner Trophy in the museum’s atrium.
“They’re just truly inspired and awed by what they see, and then being able to connect that oftentimes to right where they live and see the importance of this has been really, really cool to watch,” he said.
Digging into Indy’s history
The eight high-schoolers selected for an intensive summer program tied to excavation at the former Greenlawn Cemetery can’t legally pick up a shovel and search for remains at the site along the eastern bank of the White River downtown. But the information they’re uncovering still holds value.
Since late May, the students have been immersed in the ongoing excavation that will accommodate construction of the Henry Street Bridge, a $12 million effort. Each student has been assigned a name from cemetery records or a headstone to research. By the end of the program, the eight students will produce eight biographies of people buried at Greenlawn.
As part of Indy-ology, an educational collaboration between Indiana University Indianapolis and the city of Indianapolis, students are paid $15 an hour for the 10-week program that lasts through July; they work five hours a day three days a week. Citizens Energy Group and the Indianapolis Bond Bank pay the cost of the program.
The program allows students to study archaeology, genealogy, historic preservation and research. And at the same time, organizers hope it will expose a new generation to anthropology, the science of human beings.
Jordan Ryan, the city archivist behind the program, said the anthropology field is predominantly white. That’s why Ryan invited a Black woman who works as a technician from Stantec—the engineering firm doing excavation work at Greenlawn—to talk with the students about race and diversity. Ryan said the technician talked separately with a young Black girl in the program.
“She could see herself,” Ryan said. “It was just really moving.”
Indy-ology Project Coordinator Samantha Catchpole said she hopes every student in the program will have an opportunity to meet someone who looks like them. The students are meeting a wide range of experts through a weekly rotation.
On Tuesdays, the participants work with Brooke Drew, principal investigator of the Greenlawn site, to discuss and analyze artifacts in the City-County Building. The next day, they meet with Ryan and guest speakers to learn about research and work on their biographies. On Thursdays, the group travels to IU Indianapolis’ bioarchaeology lab to learn from Jeremy Wilson, who’s tasked with leading research into human remains found at the site.
Ryan’s guests include local historians such as DeeDee Davis, Leon Bates, Eunice Trotter and Duane Perry, all of whom have been involved in some way with the city’s Community Advisory Group. Ryan and Catchpole have also peppered the agenda with field trips, including to Crown Hill Cemetery and the Indiana State Museum.
Ryan became Indianapolis’ first city archivist nearly two years ago and, about the same time, made a cell phone note about the idea of this program—then began pitching the idea around.
“Selfishly, I’d sort of planned this on what I wish I could have been exposed to,” Ryan said.
The students are learning the ins and outs of archaeological and historical mapping, will tour the working site at Greenlawn and will learn the specifics of osteology—or the study of bones—in Wilson’s lab at IU Indianapolis.