Credit: Patricia Lamiell

Justin Nicholson practices his 30-second job pitch to be a hairstylist with Ikea Pierre. Both teens attended the Career Summer Institute at Rutgers in July.

Justin Nicholson, a high school senior who attended the Career Summer Institute at Rutgers–New Brunswick this summer, wants to be a hair stylist. The lone boy among 180 cosmetology students at Morris County School of Technology, he is comfortable breaking gender stereotypes. His carefully styled Mohawk advertises his impressive hair skills, and his sunny demeanor augers for good chair-side manners. At the institute, he discovered he will need more if he is to realize his dream of owning a salon. He will need to go to college and study business.

Nicholson was among 96 New Jersey high school students who lived at Voorhees Dormitory on the Cook/Douglass Campus for five days in July. The students came to learn about high-demand, nontraditional careers, such as nursing and engineering, in which one gender comprises fewer than 25 percent of those employed.

“This is the best group of kids so far,” said Teresa M. Boyer, the director of the Nontraditional Career Resource Center, who started the summer institute four years ago with 25 participants. This year the center received more than 200 applications for fewer than half as many spots in the program. Participants must be recommended by a high school teacher, principal, or guidance counselor.

Although competitive, the institute is not just for students with perfect grades and an arm's-length list of extracurricular activities. Rather, Boyer said, it finds the “motivated cream of the crop” students who may not be at the top of their class but who have the necessary passion and drive to break into a nontraditional career.

The institute, funded by the New Jersey Department of Education, draws students from Bergen to Cape May counties. For some, the dorm experience was the highlight. “You’d think we have been together for 30 years,” said Wayne Buchanan, a junior at Paterson Charter School for Technology who wants to become a solar and nuclear engineer.

Ikea Pierre, a sophomore at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North, came to the institute intent on becoming a plastic surgeon. But after seeing a demonstration about community service careers, she decided to explore criminal justice. Sagar Shah, a sophomore at Ridgefield Park Junior and Senior High School, has not picked a career, although he is leaning toward the sciences. He enjoyed the tour of Lockheed Martin’s facility in Moorestown, where the group heard about career opportunities ranging from engineering and the hard sciences to human resources.

Of 85 students who responded to a survey at the end of the session, 71 said they would consider taking different high school classes than they might have in the past, and the same number said they learned about careers that they weren’t aware of before attending the institute. Seventy-three respondents said they better understood how gender stereotypes affect career choices and opportunities.

Aramis Gutierrez, director of the institute, is pleased with this year’s programming as well as the student interaction and engagement. This year’s participants are organizing a program on nontraditional careers for students in their high schools. They also will serve as mentors for middle school students at workshops organized across the state by the Nontraditional Career Resource Center and report back to their institute classmates at a reunion this spring.

All of the activities, Gutierrez said, are aimed at advancing the Nontraditional Career Resource Center’s mission to build collaborations between the education and workforce development communities and increase awareness of opportunities in nontraditional careers to seventh through 12th grade students.