Businesswomen, students matched for job shadowing

Twenty-one shadows have been cast across Springfield this month.
Women Inspiring Student Entrepreneurs, a job-shadowing program for female college students at area universities, was launched March 3 with a dinner held in the Hoblit Suite at Freeman Panhellenic Hall on the Drury University campus.
Sponsored by Drury’s Students in Free Enterprise for the benefit of other students, the event was attended by 20 students from Drury and one from Southwest Missouri State University. Also in attendance were 21 area businesswomen who agreed to act as mentors for one day.
One of the goals of the program, said project leader Rachel Dapp, was to make connections.
“I’m a junior, so I know how scary it is to think about going into the real world and into your chosen career field and not having a connection or somebody to fall back on or help you build that foundation,” she said.
The Drury chapter of SIFE typically
conducts 40 projects each school year, according to SIFE Director Shannon Thomes, a Drury graduate student.
SIFE students got the word out about the program by sending an e-mail to Drury students. Fliers were posted at SMSU and Ozarks Technical Community College as well, Dapp said.
Businesswomen were contacted based on the top career choices listed by the students.
Scheduling women to be shadowed, Thomes said, can be a challenge.
“Businesswomen are incredibly busy, and the women that do take time out of their schedules to do this for us are just a blessing,” she said.
The most time-consuming aspect of the project, Dapp said, was contacting women to participate.
Tammie Tucker, a Realtor with A.R. Wilson, spent March 17 with Drury junior Leah Eaton at a Springfield Board of Realtors trade show.
“It was kind of a condensed version of what we do in our day-to-day lives, but kind of all in one setting,” Tucker said. “While we didn’t get to meet with any clients, she did get to meet a lot of loan officers and inspectors, things that go hand-in-hand with selling real estate to make our profession really more professional.”
Eaton, who wanted to get the idea of the daily life of a real estate agent, said the day gave her a good feel for the career.
“It left me with a great feeling knowing that if I entered into this career, I had so many awesome people to back me up or help me out,” Eaton said, adding that Tucker was one of those people. “She was incredibly friendly and helpful. She made me feel really comfortable and got me very motivated to be an agent. She gave me a lot of good pointers. I’m actually going to hang out with her again soon so I can get an even better idea of (her) daily life.”
Tucker, who also has participated in job-shadowing programs with high school students, said she considers it a way to give back.
“As professional women, we need to be bringing in students or young women and showing them what is available and how important it is that our role is in society, that we continue to be leaders, no matter what our industry is,” she said.
Also important, Tucker said, is to help students see how their studies will come into play in the real world. “To show them what they’re learning in school – be it math, history, science, English – (is something) they’re going to be able to use in their vocation, and real estate is one of those vocations that does utilize those talents.”
Caitlin Barrett is in her second year of Drury’s five-year architecture program. She has not yet had her day of job shadowing with Gerri Kielhofner of Butler, Rosenbury & Partners Inc., but she hopes it will provide her with a glimpse into the real-world experience of architecture.
“We talked about (how) she would take me to different parts of her office and show me what different people do in the office,” Barrett said of her plans with Kielhofner. A date has not been set, but she plans to shadow Kielhofner after Drury students return from spring break March 25.
The WISE program is scheduled to conclude April 4 with a 6 p.m. dinner at Garbo’s Pizzeria in Chesterfield Village, to be attended by the students and the businesswomen that they shadowed.
“They’ll be able to share their experiences of how the mentoring process went and what they learned from it,” Dapp said.